My goal this week is to not use the word “busy”.  It’s so meaningless.  

We aren’t getting too many days off from riding and tours, and that’s just fine.  Today was the first in a little while.  Even our days off are filled with email, phone, and other businessy things.

I slept in.  

I mean, it was a marathon of sleep.  It was an ultra-marathon of sleep.  It was a gold-medal worthy sleeping effort by me, and possibly my crowning achievement.  That should tell you a lot — that if there were ever such a thing as the sloth-olympics, I’d represent the U.S. very well.

Jeff and I were both moving slow this morning, thanks to a long night of sleep and a couple of glasses of wine at Kiona yesterday evening with Scott and Vicky and the awesome staff at Kiona Vineyards.  We came home last night with a little happy buzz and fixed dinner together — hamburgers smothered in veggies.  The other thing I could get a gold medal in is “eating”.  I’d probably take a silver in “lack of napkin use”.  I wouldn’t even podium for my belching though.  

I lingered over my journal and coffee a little too long this morning before receiving a call from my neighbor Eve that her sister was home from the hospital and jonesing for more of my chicken broth.  I make it in large quantities and can it.  With only a pint left in the pantry, I focused my efforts for the day on making some broth.  

The problem with my broth is that it’s never the same.  If I wrote a recipe for it it’d be, “clean out the freezer, simmer all afternoon.”  Whenever I cut up or peel any veggies, I throw the scraps in a ziploc bag in the freezer.  Today’s broth was heavy on peppers and onions, along with some asparagus ends, celery, carrots, and herbs.  

Ran to town to do some banking and pick up a couple of things at the store.  Scheduled staff for the week, prepped for a couple of tours, did a few dishes…

It’s 11:30 pm as I write this and my brain is completely unwilling to turn off.  

That’s a bummer, because the rest of me is looking forward to getting horizontal.

Ever heard the saying, “It’s colder than a well driller’s a**”?  I’ve often wondered why their backsides would be especially cold, or how the saying came about.  We got a chance to explore this myth last week.  

Our well is 40+ years old and to my knowledge is the oldest on Red Mountain.  Over time wells develop mineral deposits and scale which clogs the porous walls of the well and diminish the water refill rate.  Around here we also get iron and magnesium bacteria which clog the pump. We treat the bacteria with 35% Hydrogen Peroxide which does a pretty decent job of knocking the stuff back.  For scale, we use Sulfamic Acid pellets. 

I threw the Sulfamic Acid pellets down the well and waited a few hours for our well to go from “trickle” to “deluge”.  All we got was “disappointment.” 

Being without water on a farm is probably one of the most stressful experiences life will throw at you.  The only upside to well failure is that I got to drive and operate my brother’s boom truck which is something straight out of Mad Max.  Driving that thing makes bus-driving look like driving a 4-door sedan.  

We are fortunate to have awesome staff who could take over all aspects of the tours while Jeff and I worked on the well.  Our mantra for the next few days was, “we just have to NOT fight.”  High stress, dangerous work, two strong-willed and stubborn personalities — it really was the perfect storm.  Would we make it to our 9th anniversary?  That was the other question we needed to answer, besides how cold are well-driller butts and why?

I ran the boom, Jeff uncoupled the pipe as it came up.  I count it as a great success that we extracted the entire 420 feet of pipe and the pump without any drama.  People even came by to observe and left disappointed with the lack of flying pipe wrenches and creative swearing.  We’ll try to do better.  We have other projects upcoming which we will endeavor to inject with blind rage.  Observers are encouraged to bring hard hats and popcorn.

In the end, we learned that galvanized steel and stainless steel react and corrode, and that various acids will accelerate that corrosion.  I’d swear we Googled that before we connected the stainless steel pump to the galvanized pipe, but there we were with a big ol’ hole in our pipe and Google reinforcing what we’d just observed.  

In the well business, this is called “a bad thing”.

What some might take to be bad news struck us as so lucky that we bought lottery tickets.  Of all the things we envisioned, of the thousands of dollars we calculated in our minds that we’d have to spend to fix the well, it turned out it cost us $20 in parts and $100 in fuel.  

THAT is our kind of luck.  

Back down the hole with the pipe and pump and cable and … this is where our good natures deteriorated.  I wanted to test the pump before hooking it up to the pressure gauge and everything, Jeff wanted to hook it all up first.  Personal flaws unrelated to the task at hand were introduced to the discussion, as well as some sweeping accusations (and frankly, utter lies!).  There we were, at the pinnacle of success, hell-bent on self-defeat.  There’s a life-lesson in there, I’m sure.  

I’d love to say it was the influence of my persuasive nature and well-formed arguments that ultimately turned the tables.  More likely Jeff thought, “whatever it takes to shut her up.”  

Every anniversary has a “thing” — paper, cotton, linen.  Our 9th anniversary was supposed to be the Pottery anniversary but we were happy to give each other water.  Also, we discovered after the fact that we’ve been celebrating our anniversary on the wrong day for years now.  

Oops.

And yet, we remain married.

We are slowly getting things back to some shade of green, little by little.  Today we’ll return Mad Max to my brother and hopefully the next time I drive it will be strictly for funsies.  

Also, we experienced no extraordinary cooling of the backside or hint of any kind as to why well drillers have cold butts or even if they DO have cold butts at all. 

Now, I need to go wash some dishes…

It’s been awhile, so I’m making up for lost time by writing a super long post!

Long ago, and far away (actually: 43 years ago and right here) a man dug a hole and struck water.

As far as I know, it’s the first and oldest well on Red Mountain.  It has its quirks, enough that at times I feel like I should write them all down in case I get hit by a bus.

Dad drilled the well with an ancient driller (even ancient back then, and that was in the 70s) until he hit water at about 200 feet.  That was the static water line, but he needed to go deeper to sink the pump.  He hired a well-driller and somehow convinced him to drill in that same hole dad drilled, but to go deeper.  Most well-drillers won’t do that.  For good reason, as it turns out.

The well-driller went another 200 feet deeper.  Dad installed the pump and 420 feet of 2″ steel pipe.  Year: 1975.  That is a hat on Dad’s head, not his hair. 

Dad and I, 4/20/1975, the day we struck water.

Around 1999 my mother was having trouble getting enough or any water out of the well.  She hired a “well guy” who determined she needed to replace the pump.  He put in too large a pump, which drew down too much water and cavitated (sucked air), and burned out the pump in about a year.  

My older and younger brothers took matters into their own hands and replaced the pump.  It’s a dangerous job.  They bolted a pulley system to the end of a telephone pole which they sunk 6 feet deep next to the well.  They ran a cable through the pulley and attached one end to the front hitch on a truck and the other end to the water pipe.  They pulled up the pipe 20 feet at a time.  

The well pipe had several check valves through out, so the initial pull was 420 feet of 2″ steel pipe, full of water, plus the heavy electric cable that ran the length of the well, plus the pump on the end (which doesn’t weigh that much, but still).  

My older brother (Ben) took a 6″ section of 2″ steel pipe with threads, attached a clevis fastener to it, and attached that to one end of the cable.  My younger brother (Adam) screwed the steel pipe threads into the well pipe, then Ben backed the truck up 20 feet or so to lift the section of pipe out of the well.  Adam slipped a pinch-plate under the coupling, Ben lowered the pipe to let it rest on that plate, and then Adam unscrewed the section of pipe and cut the tape holding the electric cable to the pipe.  It’s a wet, tedious, and dangerous job.  I was travelling and so didn’t participate.

Screw the pin into the end of the pipe, flag Ben to raise the pipe, slip the plate under the coupling, unscrew pipe, receive giant column of water in your boots, lay pipe down, repeat.  

They did some well maintenance while they were there too, making a venturi-type device to sort of scour out the well.  

Then they reversed the whole process, sinking a new pump back in the well.  

And this is where it gets interesting, I suppose.  The well has a dog-leg in it.  Not an actual dog’s leg, but an abrupt little corner in it — not sharp but sharp enough that in order to get past it, you have to finagle the pipe and pump past it.  The dog-leg is at about 200 feet.  That’s also where Dad stopped drilling and the well-driller started.  Coincidence?  Nope, and probably one of the reasons drillers don’t like to go down an existing hole.  Anyhoo, the best finagling we’ve used has been to twist the pipe at the top with a pipe-wrench until the pump clears the dog-leg.  No biggie.  

Around 2004 or 2005 we again had water failure.  I had just moved into Mom’s house (she was in Portland).  I called a well guy.  He took about 30 seconds to glance at it and said that it’d be $5000.  Apparently the tax for being a blonde female is 400%.  I was pissed — I could tell that the pump was getting electricity and was running (he claimed the electrical had to be completely re-done and the pump wasn’t running).  I knew the failure was either lack of water in the well or a pump issue (impellers damaged?  intake screen clogged?).  But the pump most definitely ran, you could feel the vibration in the pipe.  Holding one end of a screw-driver to the pipe and one end to your ear, you could hear the pump running. 

Fortunately, the telephone pole was still in place, with the pulley.  Ben and I set aside a weekend to pull the pump and do the job ourselves.

If you ever go down a well, for any reason, plan on replacing everything you touch.  You don’t want to just have to do it again in 6 months anyway.  

We bought a pump and began the process: lift a section, pinch plate under coupling, cut tape holding electrical cable, unscrew pipe, repeat.  It was February and cold of course.  I had a pile of thick, heavy electrical cable on one side of me, and sticks of pipe on the other.  We got to the last couple of sticks of pipe and were looking forward to being done for the day when I cut the tape holding the cable to the pipe in front of me.  ZZIIIIIINNNNGGGGGG!!!!!!  the cable started thrashing next to me and shooting back down the well.  I ran for cover out of fear it’d wrap around my legs or arms or something and suck me into the well.  It flopped and twirled and spun, the plastic casing of it curling and peeling away as it shot 400′ down the casing and finally stopped.  

Shit.  

The good news was, we then determined our pump issue was one of the pump not being screwed into the end of the pipe.  The bad news was, the pump now sat at the bottom of the well, and the pipe we’d been lifting was not lifting the pump out of the well.  

Ben to the rescue, again.  He built a device like those chinese finger-cuffs you used to get in grade-school — remember those?  He used a chunk of pipe and cut tabs in the end of it.  He bent the top ends of the tabs inward.  The pipe could slip over something, but if you pulled on that something, the tabs would catch it.  The harder you pulled, the stronger the “pinch” of the tabs.  Genius, right?  

We dedicated a day to fishing the pump out of the well, holding little hope that we’d be successful. 

We gathered our materials — the pump-puller device, 450′ of cable, and the truck.  Ben drove the truck up the driveway until he’d pulled all the slack out of the cable, and I positioned the puller over the well.  Then he drove back down to the well, lowering the device down.  

Man, we hoped that thing would work.  Otherwise, we were looking at drilling a new well.  Maybe we could drop a pump in, but put it at 400 feet instead of 420, leaving the old pump at the bottom, but that didn’t sit well with us at all.  And there was the matter of the electrical cable which was still attached to the pump.  

We stood over the well, grabbed the cable, and gave it a gentle tug.  Clunk.  We looked at each other in disbelief.  

“You think it caught?” I asked.

“It sure feels like it” he said.  

“Guess we’ll pull it and find out.”  Ben got back in the truck and slowly began pulling the cable back up.  I pulled the electrical cable up and piled it to the side.  We could barely contain our excitement.  

I could see the pump when it got to about 10′ below me and I let out a screech.  

“YEAH!!!!  We got it!”  I couldn’t believe our luck.  Ben backed up the last few feet and I snatched the pump away from the top of the well before we could somehow lose it again.  He let the pump down on the ground next to me and parked the truck.

“Ho… Leee.. Shit!” he said when he came down.  

For fun, we stuck the pump in a trash can of water and powered it up.  It shot a jet of water straight out the top, working perfectly.  If it had stayed on the pipe, we’d have been in business.  We determined that the finagling at the dog-leg, where you have to sort of screw the pump into the well, is where it came loosened, and then every time the pump fired up it loosened itself further until it came unscrewed.  

Everything went back together easily, and we sunk a new pump down the well.  The total process, including the dropped pump retrieval, took 2 days.  Not bad for a couple of hacks. 

In 2013 we began to have water trouble again and finally our water failed.  Back down the well we went.  This time, Ben had a boom truck that we used to pull the pump.  We determined that the well was still good, but the pump and much of the pipe wasn’t.  Trying to pay cash and having just started our business, we opted to replace the pump and we replaced part of the steel pipe with plastic.  The next year we pulled the rest of the steel pipe and finished it all with plastic.  I’m not sure how happy I am that we are getting so good at this.

Now, we have a new problem.  Scale.  It’s an old well.  Wells are meant to be porous, which allows water to enter the well.  But over time mineral scale clogs those pores and the intake screen on your pump.  We have what is called “magnesium bacteria” and “iron bacteria”.  We haven’t reached full water failure, but the time is close.  

So, yesterday we used Sulfamic Acid pellets on the well.  These were pretty easy, we just dumped them in the well and then you have to wait for 12 to 24 hours.  It’s been 16 hours.  We are hopeful.  

If that doesn’t work, our next attempt will be Hydrogen Peroxide.  Not the stuff you get at Walgreens, but 5 gallons of 35% food-grade H2O2.  Dad’s had good luck with that in his well.  

If that doesn’t work, then we’re again pulling everything and using dry ice.  Apparently this is an old trick.  I’ve heard a few things — that dropping the dry ice into a well produced carbonic acid and that’s what removes mineral deposits.  But from what I’ve read, it doesn’t create THAT much carbonic acid.  From the videos I’ve watched, it looks more like it’s a physical removal of scale via “rapid sublimation” — aka a big ol’ dry-ice bomb.  

For your viewing pleasure… I love this, they have all of these warnings and whatnot and the guys doing it have zero protection. LOL! Could so easily be Jeff and Ben and I!

I’m officially banned from all first-aid activities.  

“Don’t be concerned when I come in the house” said Jeff when he called me.  I was inside.  He was mowing with the tractor and brush hog.  

“Um, okay” I said, no clue what he could be talking about.

He came through the door and headed to the bathroom.  I’m not going to lie, I figured he’d had a bad dose of romaine lettuce for lunch or something.  I walked down the hall and said, “You okay?”  

He poked his head out the bathroom door and I’ve never seen anything like it.  Head wounds bleed.  A lot.  I knew that.  But this was an impressive amount of blood even by head wound standards.  Jeff had so much blood running down his face that the only way you could find his eyes was if he opened them.  I could not have done a more thorough job of evenly covering him in red if I’d dunked his head in a paint bucket.  

The wound itself was a 6 inch gash that appeared to stop penetrating just shy of grey matter.

He looked fantastic.  Like an overdone ghoul for Halloween.  Or a movie star, or my first foray into makeup. 

 I can’t explain or justify my reaction.  Maybe it’s a nervous thing, or (more likely) I’m just “weird”…

I mean, it was clear that he was okay.  And although a complete and shocking mess, it was a superficial wound.  The only way I can describe my reaction was a shocked sense that his head had horribly overreacted and gone on a major drama bender.  So, I laughed.  

Because who in the heck bleeds like that?  (everyone)

Jeff was rightfully hurt by my response.  Normally I’m far more sympathetic and maybe even a bit naggy about certain injuries.  

But a head wound?  Now that’s some funny shit right there.

Now, BACK TO WORK!!