Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Mowed the yard today, including (for the first time since we bought the place) the roughly 1/3 acre of field edge on the south side of the eastern edge of our place.  This was all in weeds last year, my access blocked by the deadwood from the big black willow I cleaned up last week.  It felt good to spray it for weeds, then see the grass thriving to the point where it needed mowing.  We'll have much less problem with teasel and burdock this year.

Most of the remainder of my day was taken up with repairing the 6" irrigation water line that the fencing crew augured into yesterday.  I took the first photo before I started – this is what the fencing guys left me with.  The second photo shows what it looked like after I pumped all the water out with my sump pump.  Next is the pipe completely exposed.  At this point I located the end of the crack and sawed out the broken pipe.  In the fourth photo you see the result: the bell end of one 10' length of pipe that the augur actually hit, and the roughly 30" long resulting crack down the length of the pipe.  The heroic size of that crack is what let so much water out of the pipe.  In the fifth photo you see my repair kit on my truck's tailgate.  There's a 30" length of new pipe with a bell, much like the broken one I sawed out.  There's a short piece of pipe (21" long) with a bell at both ends – that's the magic sliding repair piece.  Finally, there's the all important “pipe lube” – basically KY jelly for PVC pipes.  The cleaned-off ends of the irrigation pipe are in the sixth photo.  Getting the dirt off them is critical to the success of the patch, as the internal rubber rings on the bells must mate precisely with the inserted pipes.  Any dirt in there can cause an annoying leak.  After I took this photo, I covered the three non-bell pipe ends with lube, slid the short double-bell piece over the piece of new pipe, inserted the bell of the new pipe into one end of the irrigation pipe, then slid the double-bell piece over the other end of the irrigation pipe.  That all sounds easy when I write it in one sentence, but in fact it took me over an hour of grunting and groaning to get all those pieces in the right place.  Those rubber seals are tight, and without the lube I don't think King Kong could do it.  The last photo shows the completed patch, pressurized and not leaking!  Yay!!!

We had one more bit of excitement today: the Hyrum canal was “turned on” today.  The photo at right shows the very first water of the year flowing under our driveway's bridge.  We weren't expecting this to happen for several more weeks, as the Porcupine Reservoir level is quite low.  This water isn't for our use – it transits through our property, delivering water to farms starting about a half mile north of us.  From our perspective, it's just a source of water for the lines of trees along its banks, and the origin of a nice, soft burbling noise as the water slowly courses along...

Curiosity's ChemCam...

Curiosity's ChemCam ... is looking closely at something.  What is it?  I haven't the faintest idea!

MESSENGER is dead...

MESSENGER is dead...  This was a completely expected, and actually planned end to the MESSENGER mission to the planet Mercury.  If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've seen a couple dozen posts I've made over the past few years about MESSENGER's series of discoveries about the formerly quite mysterious planet.  The spacecraft finally ran out of fuel and alternative propellants, and the inevitable effects of the Sun's gravity on its orbit caused it to crash.  Toward the end of its mission – the past few months – the flight controllers came up with same very ingenious ways to extend its life beyond the original plan.  They used solar wind pressure to reduce the need for thruster fuel, and when the fuel ran out they used the helium gas used to pressurize the fuel as a last-ditch propellant.  They also carefully trimmed the orbit down to the point where, if you were on the Mercurial surface, you could almost reach up and touch the spacecraft.  Quite a feat!

The deadliest massacre of Native Americans...

The deadliest massacre of Native Americans ... occurred near present-day Preston, Idaho – just 35 miles north of our home...

Opportunity is still hard at work on Mars...

Opportunity is still hard at work on Mars...  The composite photo shows an oblong crater with a rock spire inside.  That little thing recently completed its 11th year – of its 90-day mission!

The Economist notices...

The Economist notices ... that the war on drugs has failed.  When you've lost the Economist...

Progress in Paradise...

Progress in Paradise...  Yesterday was one of these days that just don't go as planned :)

First thing on my agenda was to fix the broken riser we discovered yesterday after the Paradise Irrigation water was turned on by surprise.  The first step of that project involved digging – in sloppy-wet saturated soil.  Oh, joy!  The first photo below shows the top 8" or so of the broken-off riser.  You can see that it snapped at a coupler (the top half of that coupler is visible on the left side of the broken-off part in the second photo).  This coupler was there to fix a previous break!  In the third photo you can see my riser repair kit.  The blue tool is a cordless oscillating saw – absolutely the cat's meow when it comes to cutting off broken PVC pipe.  The two little cans are the PVC pipe glue and its primer.  The glove keep my hands (sort of) clean, and the wet blue rags are how I cleaned the pipe off.  The screwdriver is for scraping off hard-to-clean dirt (there was lots of that!).  The glue joints need to be made on absolutely clean and dry pipe, so this is critical.  Finally, the box itself – that's what keeps me from having to kneel in the gloppy, gluey mud.  The last photo shows the broken-off riser after I sawed off the coupler, cleaned the pipe, and cleaned the shavings off the sawed end of the pipe (with my pocket knife).  I glued it all together and then turned on the water – and the joint held.  Yay!  Then I forgot to take a photo of the finished project :)

Next on my agenda: help spray my neighbor's yard.  My neighbors to the west have a 1 acre parcel, about half of which is lawn.  Starting this year, I'm letting them use an adjacent acre of my south field as an extended yard (they have five kids, and they need some space!).  They bought the 2,4-D spray, and I sprayed it all for them.  The arrangement we have is that my neighbors will turn that acre into a lawn, plant some trees that we mutually pick, and handle the care.  In return, we let them use it rent free.  Win-win!

Right in the middle of that spraying project, I saw a dejected-looking fencing guy waiting for me to pull alongside him.  I figured he had some questions for me, and wasn't happy about waiting for my slow approach.  Nope.  He was there to tell me that while drilling a hole for a new fence post with his power-auger, he'd drilled into a water line.  Unbeknownst to me, Loony Lake was forming just east of our house.  Yikes!  I high-tailed it to the site of the rapidly filling lake with the fellow, and quickly saw from the flow rate that it had to be Paradise Irrigation water.  Dang it!  I just fixed one leak, and now here was another!  Only this one was much worse: a six inch diameter main line buried 3' down.  The line was located in a spot where I had absolutely no idea that a water line existed.  I couldn't really blame the fence guys, as they had no idea the line was there, and they certainly didn't get any warning about it from me.

From the leak's location, I guessed that it must be the line that supplies the series of risers that run north-to-south along the east edge of our property.  That line, I knew from past experience breaking a riser, had a shut-off valve located in my back-yard.  The valve was underground, and needed a “key” to turn it off – but I had the key, and I was able to shut it off within 10 minutes of the hang-dog fencing guy stopping me.  After about 15 minutes, enough water ran off or soaked into the ground that we could get to the site of the leak.  I scraped off the first couple feet of soil with my backhoe, and then the fencing guys dug it out by hand until we could see the pipe.  Once we knew the pipe's direction, I scraped off a 8' long trench over top of it, about 2' deep again, and the fencing guys dug the rest out by hand.  We had water draining into it from the long length of pipe feeding the risers, so I rigged up my sump pump to get it out of the hole.  All this took about five hours of hard, dirty work by three of us, and completely derailed all my remaining plans for the day.  By the time they went home for the night, we had the hole mostly dug out, but water was still slowly draining into it.

Right in the middle of those repairs, my jointer arrived by freight truck, and I needed to go pick up the pallet with my tractor.  That beast weighs 380 pounds, so we weren't even going to attempt to do it by hand!

Today I'll run to Valley Implement and pick up a patch kit for the line.  Then either today or tomorrow, after the water is completely drained, I'll clean out the last dirt and mud around the pipe, saw out the section that's broken, and insert the patch.  Next week the fencing guys will be back, and they'll (very carefully!) install a post there.  Then we'll fill that hole back in. 

What a mess!