Backup

Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room
Bedsitter people look back and lament
Another day’s useless energy is spent
Impassioned lovers wrestle as one;
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young

                                      (The Moody Blues – Late Lament)

Right about then I wished I was young. I was on all fours beneath our Nest (it’s why it’s called a crawl space!) shoving a space heater before me as I crawled over dirt and gravel, through puddles of nearly frozen gray water, mindful to keep my head down to avoid banging it against a floor joist. (Why does banging your head make you so damn angry?). Anyhoo…my goal was to get the heater near where the septic line disappears into the ground where I thought maybe, just maybe, it was frozen. We’d arrived earlier in the day to find the tub and toilet had backed up. Worse, I had to remove the toilet because the overflow in the bathroom was oozing from the flange, where the seal had evidently failed. Which wasn’t all bad seeing as Happy Wife has wanted to replace that damn toilet for years (cracked bowl). She and I must’ve used every towel we had to sop up the gray water as it gurgled out of the poop drain (see photo) once we’d removed the toilet. By then it was dark outside, maybe 10ยบ with a 30+ mph north wind. That made the repeated trips under the house to pull back sodden floor insulation to assess the scope of the damage all the more fun. Nothing like gray water flash-frozen to your face to get the weekend started right!