"For every good day, there is an equal and opposite bad day."
- Newton’s Third Law of Karma

I had a pretty good day at work on Friday. I got just about everything done that I wanted to, everybody in our section of the cube farm seemed to be in pretty good spirits, and the next version of our application is coming along quite nicely.

So nicely, in fact, that the powers that be decided to hold a barbecue, and hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and potato salad were in abundance for all and sundry. I sat at a table on our upstairs patio happily munching on this unexpected repast surrounded by happy, chatting colleagues as clouds scudded across a relatively warm November sky. It was a good day. Alas, nothing good seems to ever come without a price. Why the hell is that? Can’t the Universe throw us a freebie every now and then?

It was almost enough to make me forget that my wife had called earlier to inform me that the water main into our house was leaking. When I arrived home, I saw that the soil under our front deck was sodden. I figured the leak was coming from an old, disused sprinkler system that I’ve been capping off wherever new leaks crop up at old couplings, and as such, not a big deal. I turned over a few cursory shovelfuls of earth, but found nothing conclusive, and decided to attack it on Saturday.

Saturday morning, my wife noticed that the water seemed to be flowing from underneath the deck. Dismayed, I pried up a few planks in the afternoon and tried to see the source of the flow. My initial estimations proved incorrect, and not only was the sprinkler system not the source of the trouble, I wasn’t looking in the right spot. Again, my sharp-eyed wife spotted a tiny burble in the water that seemed to indicate where the break in the line had occurred. At that point, however, I realized with dismay that there was no way to fix the leak without dismantling the entire deck; even with all the necessary planks removed, the supports were going to be in the way of any repair work. The lazy little fountain was right underneath one of the central beams.

To be honest, we’d talked about removing the deck anyway; we really only used it to as a platform for potted plants, and the prodigious amounts of water that were therefore dumped on it were contributing to a several major points of rot on both planks and beams. On Sunday morning, I went to the hardware store and returned bearing a shiny new sledgehammer, and, additionally equipped with my trusty crowbar that I call "Gordon Jr.", tore the deck down. My wife’s Norse blood could not resist the hammer’s song, and she joined in the destruction, lusty daughter of Thor that she is.

Finally, the deck was demolished and piled in a nail-studded, spider-ridden heap on my lawn. The digging commenced. This was a major pain in the ass. The deck was nothing.

The soil where I live is entirely composed of clay. When clay gets wet, it creates a sticky, gooey, squelching substance that can easily pull the boots right off your feet if you’re not careful, and temporarily immobilize you completely if both feet are ankle-deep in the stuff. To make matters worse, the clay also readily sticks to shovels; sometimes you have to scrape the shovel clear after every scoop. My boots quickly became so caked with mud that there was literally two inches of clay on the bottom of my soles. Nature’s elevator shoes, I guess.

Eventually, I struck the pipe. We checked to confirm the leak by turning the main valve on at the street. Sure enough, the leak seemed to be coming up right underneath it, right at a coupling at the edge of our exploratory hole. Joy! All we have to do is dig it out a bit more and — *CLANK*. Clank? What the hell is this, a rock? Our shovels hit something hard and gritty.

No, not a rock, it was a huge concrete pour right at the edge of our hole. Directly above the pipe. About two feet deep and almost as wide, a big lump of concrete. What the hell?!? We sat in the mud, dispirited, wondering about how we were going to move the stupid thing. A neighbor, out for a stroll, came up to check out all the destruction, and, after some deliberation, left, then came back with his boots and another shovel. The concrete proved surprisingly light once we’d dug around it, and the two of us heaved it out of the pit. Now, finally, we could excavate the pipe. We got to digging through the glutinous muck.

At long last, we’d excavated the pipe, and saw that at some point the pipe had been patched with a section of slightly larger pipe and a pair of couplings. I sent my wife down to the street to turn on the water once again, and we watched expectantly as we heard the pipes pressurize, half expecting to be sprayed with muddy water as the leak, finally exposed, could freely vent. Sure enough, the water came up. From the mud. Under the pipe.

Fuck. We’d only reached the sewer pipe. More digging. Another eight inches down we finally found a split copper pipe that a growing root had pushed aside, causing the rupture. Another turning of the valve at the street sent up a shower of mist and water that left no doubt we’d finally found our culprit. The leak, while significant, was not enough to really drop the water pressure into the house, so we let the water run and the whole family quickly hosed down and showered as the sun set, then we shut it off.

Not wanting to take any time off from work, we had a largely waterless Monday, only turning the main valve on for the wife’s morning and the kids’ nightly ablutions, a rented sump pump the only thing between us and a completely flooded front yard, which looks like hell.

The plumber arrives today.