Engineering problem

Spent the morning this morning solving a minor problem in home engineering. The objective was to sink some drip irrigation tubing underground to water two clumps of pampas grass, a clump of red fountain grass, and to keep water dripping into our bird bath. Sounds easy — but here's the catch: the water fauce to which this all needed to be attached was on the other side of a solid concrete sidewalk. Somehow I needed to get some flexible 1/2" tubing run under that sidewalk!

The solution, as with virtually all home engineering projects, involved a trip to Home Depot. They get more of my paycheck than Arnold Schwarzenegger does, but somehow I'm less resentful of Home Depot's take. Oh, I guess it's because I get something tangible from Home Depot, and from the state I get...what? Anyway, I bought a length of 1/2" PVC pipe, a cap for that pipe, and the parts to allow the pipe to be attached to a garden hose. I drilled a few holes in the cap, attached it to a hose, turned on the faucet, and voila! A $5 drilling tool. Took me about 3 minutes to poke that thing all the way under the sidewalk.

Naively I thought that was just about the end of my job. All I'd have to do is push that tubing through the tunnel I'd just drilled, and I'd be in business. But would that tubing go through the tunnel? No way, Jose.

That's when the real battle commenced. It was over an hour before I finally had the tubing run through, and then only with the help of my wife. I won't bore you with all the failed attempts, but here's the one that worked: First, I attached a steel ballchain to a fiberglass "fish" and pushed that through the tunnel (the "fish" is designed for snaking cables through cielings and walls, but it worked great for this). The "fish" wouldn't make the turn at the opposite end of the hole, so I used a magnet on a string to fish up the steel ballchain from a foot or so below ground level. Then I tied a rope to the ball chain, and pulled the "fish", ballchain, and rope all the way through the tunnel. This gave me a rope all the way through the tunnel. Then I tied the end of the tubing to the rope, and pulled it back through the tunnel (I could pull it through, but not push it through — some kind of physics problem to solve someday). This is where my wife came in. You see, that *$*$@#) tubing didn't want to make the bend right at the end of the tunnel to come back above ground. So I got on the rope end and pulled like hell, and Debi got on the other end and wiggled the tubing around. Oh, and I also had water flowing through the tubing to help push debris out of the way. Well, with some heaving and a few oaths (from both of us), I finally got the tubing pulled through. Whew!

The rest of the project was just as straightforward as it sounds, and didn't take very long. Now I have three happy plants, a completely hidden system, and fresh water in the bird bath...