Water Pipe Leak, Bad Electricity, Indian Summer, and Clotheslines

It’s been a wild week around my home!  I experienced a underground water pipe leak in my front yard, which explained why my grass, trees, and hedges have stayed so green over the summer.  Apparently it had been leaking for quite some time, and last week it reached critical mass.  I arrived home one day to find water running down my driveway, and the lawn completely saturated.  Really a helpless feeling!  Luckily a friend found the leak (which was caused by pressure from a large rock), and fixed it.  But it was pretty wet, muddy, and dirty in the meantime.  It’s amazing how much water can escape from a small break in the line, and it made me realize how much I take water for granted.

Later in the week, half my electrical power in the house went out!  I called PUD, and they immediately dispatched a huge amount of electrical workers, trucks and equipment to my house.  Seriously, the place was swarming!  I have underground wiring, so they were testing and digging to see what the problem was.  They found a big section of the line that had deteriorated and ‘almost caused an open neutral’.  I have no idea what an open neutral is, but apparently it is bad.  REAL bad!  Like destroying all the electronics in your house and causing fires bad.  Anyway, I am very glad that they caught it and fixed it.  I am completely in love with electricity and would never want to live without it. 🙂

The good thing is that we’ve been experiencing an unprecedented dry streak in Seattle.  It has been a glorious Indian summer – dry and warm.  It’s been wonderful to be able to stretch out the outdoor clothesline season for a while longer.  The load of laundry I hung outside today dried in about 2 hours, which is amazing.  I love this vintage graphic of a happy homemaker hanging laundry on the clothesline.  It’s pretty much how I feel when I get to use the clothesline into the fall…and knowing that my water and electricity are working just swell again!

~Marilyn Huttunen