Our
accountant friend, Sheldon, found a way to get back some of the money taken
from us by Uncle Sam. We decided to
share the wealth with our neighbor, Jerry, and his helpers.
They
showed up last week during a late spring snow storm with all their toys, err—tools
and gear.
Yes,
after nearly forty years of dragging hoses we decided to finally step into the
Twenty-First Century and have an automatic sprinkler system installed on our
property.
The
workers spent the morning charting locations for the spray heads.
Footprints
in the snow made it easier to map out the project.
They
dug a big hole by our water meter and another by the front sidewalk, then took
their stuff and left.
The
snow had melted by the next morning and Jerry’s guys were back with their
trencher and lots of pipe. They hooked
one end of the pipe to the blade of the trencher and took off across the lawn.
They
were training a rookie and had to give him some lessons on playing out the
pipe.
In
no time at all the project was under way.
It
wasn’t exactly clear as to whether they were putting down pipe or just plowing
up the yard.
Or
maybe looking for the bodies.
DH
told the guys where all the bodies were buried so they could work around them.
Another
big hole. This time the guys were
filling a box full of valves and gadgets to control the system.
By
the afternoon Rookie had a friend digging holes with him.
“Why are you digging a hole?”
“I’m looking for buried
treasure.”
“What have you found?”
“A few dirty rocks, a weird
root, and some disgusting grubs.”
“On your first try?”
“Yeah! There’s treasure
everywhere!”
Quote from
Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes
Now
our yard was looking like the guys were dealing with a bad gopher
infestation. And maybe they were wiring
the place with plastic explosives to blow the whole lawn.
“Free to kill gophers at
will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a
varmint. And a varmint will never quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong -
Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior
firepower. And that's all she wrote.”
Carl
Spackler, Caddy Shack
Rookie
and his friend went to work in the holes connecting sprinkler heads to the pipe.
“Look! A trickle of water
running through some dirt! I’d say our
afternoon just got booked solid!”
Bill Watterson
By
the end of the afternoon there were sprinkler heads every place there was a
pink flag.
Out
front by the water main they were filling up the big hole. In fact they filled up all the holes, packed
down the trench ridges, replaced the sod…
…and
cleaned up the rubble. They checked things
out and went away to wait.
They
needed a way to hook up the electricity to run the system so we called another
neighbor.
LeRoy
and his son, Levi, came by and installed an outlet by the new sprinkler-system
control box, so we gave them some of our tax return.
When
the system was finally hooked up, the heads popped up out of the lawn like
snakes out of a basket and sent a gentle sweep of water to the surrounding grass.
The timer
is set to water after midnight which is much more efficient than our old method
of randomly running water during the afternoons. We just have to remember all this when the
grandkids want to sleep out at night in the yard.
