Adrian called Kimball after her doctor’s appointment Tuesday. Dr, Boudreaux told her she thinks it may be a December baby. She originally predicted Nov. 28. Just as long as he and his momma are healthy.

-I discovered this week that I am exactly half bright. That may be the first time that I got that quantified for me. The way I learned that tidbit ended well which is not often the case with experience. Usually, I recognize a mistake the second time I’m about to make it… maybe.

Last Friday morning started off uneventfully until I opened the west door to our house which I don’t normally do. I think I was looking for Adrian and Kimball’s cat, Bella, who lives with us. She’s an out-cat. Any time day or night for any excuse, she wants to go outside.

I didn’t see Bella on the west side of the house, but water covering the south yard got my attention. My eyes followed it back to our driveway where I could see the water had current to it… and it hadn’t been raining. (We did get three inches over the weekend.) There wasn’t any water near the west hydrant which Kimball uses to water her flowers, but I decided to go downstairs and turn off the water pump switch. That stopped the flow.

I went outside and backtracked the leak. It surfaced several feet west and downhill from the hydrant. I got a pipe wrench and removed the top of the 8-inch PVC pipe Josh Culver had helped me install a few years ago as an access to the cutoff valve we installed for the hydrant which we put on a T off the main water line.

The pipe had about three feet of water in it. Now when I installed a hydrant east the house several years before that, I made a cutoff tool out of a four foot section of PVC pipe by putting a T on it for leverage and cutting two notches on the bottom end to fit the valve’s handle. I tried that tool down in the hole where I couldn’t see because of the water but never could get it to make contact.

I went up to see my brother-in-law, Tom Gough, and told him I needed a miracle. We were standing in his shop mulling over various tools when he spied one and said, “Shop Vac.”

I said, “I’ve got one.” I soon had run an extension cord and put the Shop-Vac hose in the hole. Within minutes it had pumped almost all the water out of the hole exposing the round knurled handle of the valve.

I went to town and David Benham helped me pick out a 10 ft. section of PVC pipe which I took home and notched snaggle-toothed hoping it would fit the handle. Didn’t work. So I removed two of the “teeth.” I twisted on it for a while and decided to turn the pump back on to test my work. No running water in hole.

You don’t know how relieved I was that I didn’t have to dig a hole by the hydrant to fix the leak… or get Davis or someone else to do it. The whole process would have been a lot easier if I had enough foresight to make a cutoff tool when I had full access.

On any future projects I’ll try to anticipate actually using the parachute. KL