More Water Woes

We've had more fun with water today. After finally flushing out all the pipes and cleaning the bathrooms, we thought we were home free. This morning, while using our bathroom sink, I noticed a leak around the faucet assembly. Then I heard a small drip, drip, drip under the sink. Don was called into action. He soon concluded that that particular leak could not be fixed; the whole assembly would have to be replaced. Fortunately, we are going to French Harbor tomorrow and can stop by the new Ace Hardware store for a replacement.

We live on a steep hillside. That's our house in the photo above. Along side both sides of the road, there are gutters to drain rainwater. We've had a lot of rain over the past four days which washed a lot of leaves into the gutters. The coral trees lining our side of the road are dropping leaves (aided somewhat by the leaf-cutter ants). The heavy rains have pushed all those leaves down the gutter and deposited them beside our top step, plugging up the small culvert under that step. The plug kept growing larger with every rain (we kept forgetting to go unplug it when it wasn't raining). This morning, while Don was working on the faucet,  I decided to pick up all those leaves, not realizing that there would be ants under the leaves just waiting for someone to bite. Yikes! One foot covered in ant bites. At least they weren't fire ants.

This is an old photo of Rachel and Don standing on the road beside our house (and Merlin's workers walking up the hill).

Another shot from in front of our house, looking down the road.
Those gutters work much better when not full of leaves.

Dennis stopped by with our electric bill this morning. We were discussing the water situation, how dirty the water was at first, how our reserve tank had collected a lot of that dirt. He said he had switched us over to his other huge tank which is now full of clean well water and safe to drink. He said that he has spent so much money on pump repairs, tank repairs, pipe repairs, that he is going to have to charge us more for water.  At least we have clean water again. I'm now catching up on laundry and hoping that our water woes are firmly behind us.