"Post No. 661"

Things may be finally looking on the "UP" side for us now.

Yesterday we got our new gas lines laid and the water heater hooked up. In fact, ALL of the new gas lines are now inside of the house, just awaiting next week or so when the plumber will be reattaching the heaters.

I also got the lines recovered with soil and that mess looking a lot better, the lines primed and painted with rust-proof white paint and braces for those attached, and the man from the local gas company came by this morning and inspected same and turned back on the gas, so now, no more heating up water on the electric stove for bathwater. Tonight I'll finally get my first good, hot bath without a all of that hassle in two months.

In other good news, my wife has found a part-time job (25+ hours a week) and begins this coming Sunday. It's min. wage, of course, but every penny will help. The past couple of months have been rough on us, but it appears that just maybe we've gone around the bad karma loop and back in a better direction for a while.

I'm still working on that large brush pile and have gotten it in my head now to make a path right through the middle of it to undermine some of the items that are too stuck for me to manually remove. I've been able to chop up all of the treated wood and such into very small pieces and bag those up for removal in the garbage pickup, as well as cut a couple of large sections of old carpet that was in this mess into strips, roll those up and bag them and get shed of those the same way. I've seperated out still four piles: large logs that need to be cut up, treated lumber, bricks and concrete blocks, and metal. There's a couple of pieces of large metal roofing that, IF I can flatten them out, I plan to recycle by attaching them with nails and/or screws to the bottom side section of my old garage where it needs repair, then repainting those.

The neighbor is taking any bricks and plans to build a BBQ from them, and I confiscated the concrete blocks since I'm always needing them for something. I was also able to get a few pieces of items from that I can actually re-use, and I've contacted someone that heats with wood in the Winter to come cut up what wood he can get from the logs to burn. The rest of the metal and treated lumber we'll probably just have to haul off to the dump, or, as I considered, I may just dig a large hole in the far back of the lot and bury that in the area in which I want to redistribute all of the extra dirt.

Coming Next: "DITKO - The Evolution of A Man With A Hat".