No, not a fad diet or ill-effect of bad food choices. This list represents the order in which I curse the local utilities at 7am every morning.
You see, in March the good people at National Grid sent us a letter alerting us to a new gas main coming right up. Yay! 6 weeks of digging a trench down the odd side of our street! And, dude, that digger machine thing is the noisiest thing on wheels when it's just moving and not even digging! I simply cannot overstate the amount of creak and screech let out as it rolls up the road every day at precisely 7 am. Disney could not invent a noisier machine in a movie about poor, old post-apocalyptic tractors dying for lack of oil (until some sprightly robot comes along and, with the aid of a fiery redheaded girl, saves the world and simultaneously lubes his joints - this is Disney after all).
Anyway. Gas line. In. Done. Moving on.
One week later (April 23rd, to be exact) we got a letter from our fair town telling us that we will be the recipients of a new water main, too! Hooray! Jackpot!
Not.
This time they dug up the even side of the road, and installed temporary, above ground water pipes along both sides - meaning they also had to put sand and asphalt up around those pipes to create ramps at all the driveways. Very sexy. (Additionally, these overland pipes provide a new spectator sport where you get to watch your guests struggle with where they are supposed to park and worry that they are not supposed to drive over or step on the pipes. Fun!)
That digging lasted until about 2 weeks ago. And then they started in on the digging of horizontal trenches every, oh, 15 feet or so. This work ends this week. They are actually, as of last week, beginning the removal of the overland pipe on the even side. And, my neighbors on either side report that they are back on the water grid. I, for some reason, am still getting my water via a garden hose that runs from my neighbor's outdoor tap. I am not kidding, I have been getting water this way since early May. Second hand hose water = not awesome.
So today I have to call and see why they are all "on the main" and we are not. Because, you know, calling public utilities is so totally my fave.
But, whatever, it's not even bothering me really, because, ummm, last night the line from the (brand new!) gas main to the neighbor's house broke. Why do we care, neighbor's problem, right? Weeeelll, 100 or so years ago somebody cut a major corner and instead of giving the good folks in my hood their own gas service lines, they piped up to this particular neighbor's house and then ran a pipe from their basement to mine. Crazy, right? Not as crazy as what they did after that - which is to then run a pipe through my basement to the house on the other side, and from them to the one after that. Yep, one service, four houses.
Apparently totally, totally, totally uncool by modern day codes and standards and rules and whatnot.
Soooo, gas leak at house #1 means no gas for houses #1-#4. And, well, they don't "fix" shit like this and move along. Noooo, they need to bring us to code. Which means a new line from the street. And that means a trench from the street to the house. And that means "1-2 weeks of digging."
By the end of this I may well have post-traumatic stress disorder and start flapping my arms and crying when I see a digger or jackhammer, or even a guy in a damned yellow safety vest.
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