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Sprung a leak

It only cost $1200 to recover all my photos. A bargain at twice the price. Not! I also found my resume among the data saved from our crashed computer. That's something. It's nice not to have to rewrite it, although with my track record of late, maybe I should make a few revisions anyway. We also found a few of Ron's important client files on the recovery disk along with plenty of junk. Oh well. Live and learn.
Turns out we had a little earthquake impact at our house after all. The other day, I went to add some chlorine to our water tank and noticed that it was less than a fifth full. Yikes. It hadn't rained hard in awhile, but it seemed unimaginable that we could have used up all that water so fast. We're talking 10,000 gallons! After some careful examination, we found the cause. The overflow pipe had moved out of alignment with the main input line, causing a leak at the joint where the two pipes meet. None of the rain had been making it's way to the tank. Instead, it just spilled out onto the ground. Bummer. When I picked up the overflow pipe and moved it, the two connecting pipes resealed at the joint and all was fixed. Before I moved it, that pipe had been sitting in the exact groove in the dirt where it had always been. The only only way it could have moved is if the ground itself had moved. So it has more than likely been leaking since the earthquake, which means that a whole month's worth of rain was lost. Add to that our regular showers, flushes, dished and laundry using water from the tank and you have a recipe for disaster. Fortunately we discovered the problem before we ran out completely. As it is now, we've adopted the Focker's mantra: If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down. I plan to take a couple of laundry loads to the launderette tomorrow.
Ron has been cutting down trees all week. I think he's channeling the spirit of Paul Bunyan. Unfortunately, he hasn't quite got his aim perfected. A big fat one landed squarely on top of an avocado tree today, snapping it in two. I tried grafting the top back to the bottom with electrical tape and re-rooting another big branch that had been severed. We'll see if they make it.
A hui hou. Aloha!

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