Did You Ever Have One of Those Days?

Did you ever have one of those days? Not one of those days where nothing goes right, but one of those days where you expect everything to go horribly wrong and miraculously everything works out pretty well. Well, I managed to get lucky and have one of the latter today. Today was the day chosen to trench my new electrical service in. This was the first day I could get both dad and Logan to help me so we penciled it in last week. I decided to fork out the big bucks and rent a ride on trencher with a blade for backfilling the trench. It was like $350 to rent it for a whole day so I talked the place into letting me rent it for half a day and take it home the night before. Score one for me. So I got the rental set up last week along with a concrete saw rental so we could remove a chunk of sidewalk we had to go under. So, last week I was already sweating things. We would have to remove the sidewalk, cut 80' of trench, miss all the utilities, lay the conduit, get the electric company to inspect it, backfill the trench, and return the equipment to Springfield all before lunch. So last week I had serious doubts that we would even come close to getting all that done. Then comes yesterday.

Yesterday I look at the weather and see Tuesday's forecast... "100% chance of rain." Great. On the bright side, it warmed up Monday and was supposed to be in the upper 40's Tuesday. Still, it was a less than ideal forecast for being outside and digging all morning. So between our timing restraints, relative ignorance with what we were doing, and the weather outlook, I was getting seriously worried.

I heard rain hitting the window on and off all last night while I slept. I woke up this morning expecting the worst. I literally was so nervous that I was getting stomach pains. I peeked outside and things were wet, but the rain seemed to have tapered to a light sprinkle for the moment. Then I looked at the radar and here's what I saw.Yeah, not a real promising picture. That is until I looked closer.

You can just barely see Springfield in the edge of the u-shaped rain-free area. If you look back at the national picture you can see how long the rain-free path is. As luck would have it, the wind was blowing SW to NE. I began to think that we might just luck out and not get drenched. I must have said the right prayer last night or something, because that's how things ended up working out. It was almost pleasant out there all morning.

So, we started in on things around 7 this morning. Everything went like clockwork. All 3 of us worked pretty much constantly from 7 to 11, but we got everything we needed to done by then. The only things we lacked were the electric company's inspection and a little hand work. I had set my watch alarm to go off when we needed to start loading the trencher back up to get it returned on time. The alarm went off while we were chaining the machine down. We got it back with a whole 15 minutes to spare.

After feeding my weary crew in Springfield we came back, finished up our hand work, and even had time to mount the new meter box to the house. Then the electric company finally showed up about 3. (I called them Friday and they said they would be here around 10 in the morning today.) They usually inspect the conduit before you bury it, but I had a trencher to return to they had to inspect what was left showing. They saw a couple minor things they didn't really like, but said they could work around them.

So all in all, today was a BIG win for the home team. This was probably the toughest thing we'll have to do during this whole project. It should be mostly downhill from here (hopefully). I know somebody was looking out for us today. Even now looking back at this morning, I still can't believe we did everything that we did before lunch. It seems like it should take a whole day. Then if all that wasn't cool enough, I find out that my boss, Uncle Rod, got arrested by the FBI today too! I hope he gets what's coming to him! What a great day all around. I'll close with a big shout out to Log and Pa Dudley. I owe them both BIG after this one. Good thing they work for food.