Post the second!
Another week has gone by with many things to tell... and somehow either I didn't have time or didn't feel like it. On the off chance that I actually did want to post an LJ entry, LJ was suffering from DDOS attacks yet again. (Can't the assholes instead attack Facebook or some other social network that I am NOT using? :p)
So now you sort of get everything in one day. But in separate posts so you only have to read the bits you're interested in. Or none. Whichever.
First: new house stories!
- - -
I think you only ever got bits and pieces of The Soakaway Story. In short: Our house isn't connected to the city's sewage systems, so it came with its own cesspit. Which used to be basically a kind of bunker where all the waste water from the house was collected. Once a month, a dumping lorry had to come down here to pump out the cesspit. This is fairly expensive because it is, if you'll excuse the lousy pun, a shitty job for the person who does it. These days you have rather more intelligent soakaway systems than they had a hundred or whatever years ago, namely, a sort of bunker where stuff first gets collected, then the solid bits sink down while the liquid bits are directed into a reed pool. The roots of the reeds filter the liquid sewage so that by the end of the you mostly just have water left, which then flows into an infiltration ditch, where it slowly seeps into the ground. Naturally the first part in the chain still has to be pumped out regularly, but thanks to the removal and filtration of the liquid sewage, "regularly" means "every three years" rather than "once a month", which is obviously an improvement. Installing such a Dreikammergrube ("three-chamber soakaway", if anyone actually knows what it's called in English pray tell me) is naturally also expensive and will only pay off (monetarily) in twenty years or so, but as we had no idea how long the old cesspit would still work (rather than deciding to cave in just when our tenants' kids were playing football on top of it or something), we were expecting the necessity of installing a new soakaway about any time - so it made sense to tackle it before it was unavoidable, reasoning that things never become unavoidable at reasonable times but rather, I dunno, in mid-January during a blizzard when it cannot be done. So last summer, that was our big project, which was fortunately mostly done by a company specialising on these things.
Unfortunately, even when you're having specialists doing it, you need all sorts of permissions from the town and the water authority board and, in the case of our house, the environmental office. This is a long story in and off itself. Suffice it to say that we sent in the plans in full detail, and that these plans in all their glory were approved of. I could tell you now that we sent in the plans during the summer of '09, and the permission was finally granted in April '10, and how these things came to pass, but... nah.
Anyway.
After the new cesspit had been finished, that is, by October 2010, the environmental office sent a functionary to see whether everything had been done according to plan and rubber-stamp the whole affair. The functionary took a good long look around, said that this was the most beautiful three-chamber soakaway he'd ever seen, he'd send us the necessary licence, and that would be it. Then we didn't hear a thing for weeks. Then, just a few days after Christmas, we got a letter revoking the permission because of a number of complaints the delightful functionary had never mentioned while he had, like, actually been there. Unless we took care of the complaints by April 2011, basically the environmental office would sue us for everything we owned and then some. Hurrah.
After we had recovered from the shock, managed to get into the New Year almost without accident, and waited for the snow to melt, we called a surveyor in order to get a second opinion. The surveyor said that all the complaints were bullshit. But we could change a thing or two just to make the environmental office happy, perhaps? So we called the specialists who had built the cesspit and told them what was going on. They had a hearty laugh about the environmental office's demands and then told us that of course these changes could be made, they were entirely unnecessary but certainly possible, here's the price. It was... rather more than we were willing to pay for something that was not actually necessary.
Meanwhile, the surveyor had called the environmental office, who sent us a new letter, reducing the list of complaints from five to two but still demanding that the changed be made and finished by April.
After a few more calls to ascertain just how exactly they imagined the changes (and the proof of them), we... decided to go about it. On our own.
Said changes were: At the inlet and outlet of the reed pool, a drainage pipe had to be connected to the pipes. Because clearly water won't flow downhill of its own accord if there isn't a drainage pipe to guide it.
Additionally, the floor of the infiltration ditch had to be covered in concrete. As the point of the infiltration ditch is that the water will seep into the ground, we still don't quite see the point, but... very well. Des Menschen Wille ist sein Himmelreich. Let the water see how it manages to get into the ground now. (There's an overflow pipe in the ditch that will now have to take care of the seeping, because clearly if it were meant to only drain off any possible overflow, it wouldn't be called overflow pipe. Silly of us not to see that.)
The unfortunate thing about the reed pool is that, at the top end, what comes in is... well... liquid sewage. Which means that it no longer has the consistency of shit (instead it rather looks like diluted white coffee), but it damn well still has the smell. This is normally not a problem because the pool is covered in gravel which suffices to keep the smell down. It becomes a problem, however, when you have to shovel the gravel aside in order to put a completely unnecessary drainage pipe into the pool because basic physics don't apply to the environmental office.
I did what every sympathetic, caring wife would do: I said "I'm pregnant, I can't shovel shit right now, germs bacteria DANGER" and let my husband do all the nasty work. But as I was doing garden stuff right next to the pool, I got more than a good whiff of the lovely eau de puisard. Jörg, meanwhile, got cuts on his fingers from shovelling the gravel and fighting with the pipes, which naturally got inflamed over the course of the next day (the fingers, that is, not the pipes) because that's what happens when open cuts get into contact with sewage. It all went well, though, by Monday they were healing normally. Hurrah for tetanus shots and modern hygiene!
It could bore you with further technical rambling, but I am boring myself so I'll leave it at that. At any rate, after many colourful curses and some struggles against further basic physics (getting a hollow pipe to stay underwater until you've had time to put the gravel back in place is less easy than you may think), the drainage pipes were installed, the process was duly photographed for the environmental office, and that was complaint No. 1 dealt with. And then Jörg climbed into the infiltration ditch, against all likelihood did not suffocate, against further likelihood managed to get the floor dry enough to spread concrete, and even managed to climb out of the ditch again. Then the lid (kind of like a millstone) was closed again. And Jörg took a long, long shower.
Now we have to wait until the environmental office sends another functionary to see whether the changes have indeed been effected, and to (hopefully) licence our beautiful soakway then. However, we are fully expecting instead to get a letter concerning the absurdity of concreting the floor of a bloody infiltration ditch, wtf, demanding that we remove the concrete at once or they'll sue us for... etc. etc. ad nauseam. In which case we shall not be responsible for what we do.
- - -
Next up: new baby stories!