The Honest Courtesan

Just once, I’d like to return from a trip without having to deal with some kind of problem before I can even get settled in.  After returning from Freedom Fest on the 24^th I spent a few days in Seattle, then returned home to Sunset on Wednesday.  While refilling the dogs’ water bowl, I noticed the water pressure was extremely low, so I went around to make sure nobody had left anything running.  Nobody had, and within another hour there was no water at all.  At first Grace thought the pressure switch had gone bad, but when she bypassed it to check the pump we still had no water.  Fortunately, we had already purchased a new pump when we first moved here, since there was no way to know just how old the one that came with the property might be; unfortunately…have you ever changed a well pump?  It’s not hard, but it’s strenuous and time-consuming and absolutely fucking filthy.  There was also no way to know how deep the well was, so I just had to keep pulling the hose up (with Grace guiding it out of the well casing) until we found the pump; since the water table is pretty high here I knew it wouldn’t be too deep, but that still meant I had to pull up 14 meters of water-filled irrigation pipe with a waterlogged pump at the bottom.  Then I had to dash to town to get about $30 worth of fittings while Grace switched out the pumps, and when I returned (about 5 PM) we still had to wire up the new pump and carefully lower it back down the shaft, then reconnect it to the water system.  We finished a little after 8, at which point we discovered the damned thing still wouldn’t work due to an overloaded control box.  Still, that meant we could hot-wire the pump to fill up the pressure tank so we could take showers and have water overnight, and we replaced the faulty control the next day.  As you can see, the old pump was a Sears model which (according to the serial number) was built in 1992; I’m definitely not complaining, because nearly 30 years is a pretty good operational life for any mechanical device run as hard as a well pump is.  But all the same, I’d have been happier if it had held on for just a few extra days.