Watch me get dirty

Welcome Ms Jessie L to the House of Dana! This past year I have been so lucky to have received the most generous help and assistance from a plethora of family and friend-folk as I have started preparing this place to house myself and my quirky lil' life. Each person who comes to help brings different skills, personalities, styles of work and fun and leaves me with a new story to tell. I have such a blast having people over and working with them and I am very grateful for it all.

This past weekend my ole buddy Jessie asked me if I wanted to hang out. Well, I was planning a big day of productivity for myself out at the land, since it was the first sunny nice spell in soooo long, so I left Jessie a message saying if she felt like watching me get dirty, she should come on out. She in turn left me a giggly message saying that sounded good. I couldn't tell if she was serious or not, so I was delighted when she did indeed come on over Saturday afternoon. Even more delighted I was to learn that she not only wanted to witness me get dirty, but she wanted to help with a project. Well, hee haw. There was some serious measuring to be done.

For the past year I have wanted to measure the following: the specific drop in elevation from the spring to the potential spot that a ram pump will go, the specific rise in elevation from the potential site of the pump to the ridge above the house where a water storage tank will sit, and the specific drop in elevation from the storage tank to the house. I am talking about vertical elevation measurements, and I do not have a gps system, so I have often thought about what would be the simplest way to take these measurements. About a month or 2 ago I journeyed down to the old county tax office and got a topographic map of the property that contains contour lines every 10 feet, so I was able to infer approximate elevations of the various points, but I wanted more specific measurements to plug into a formula (along with gallons per minute of spring water flow) to figure the practicality and appropriate size of a (non-electric) ram pump.

As it turned out, it was a good thing I waited so long to go ahead and take these measurements because Jessie was the perfect person to complete this project with. You see, we have a habit of laughing a lot. About most things. And it turns out that measuring vertical elevation differences was no exception. Our method was simple: I measured and marked one foot increments on a 10 foot long straight pole. She held the pole at the starting elevation and I went uphill a ways to a point on the ground and shot a red laser light from a laser level loaned to me by this friend. I shot the laser onto the measuring pole and recorded the vertical rise in feet from her point to my point on a piece of paper. Then she would move up to my point and I would go uphill a ways, and we would repeat the process. We did this all the way up to ridge, Jessie with a beer in one hand and the pole in the other. Me every time struggling to see the red laser light among the bright glare of afternoon sun reflecting off of snow. We giggled our way up the mountain, and had a real hoot when Jessie made the analogy that helping me with this task was like shopping with her mother. You walk a few feet and then stand there for a while, then walk a few more feet then stand there for a while while the other person does something.

I was quite satisfied (and a bit dirty) by the time we finalized the measurements. (For nerds who are interested, it is a 20 foot drop from the spring to the pump site, a 95 foot rise from the pump site to the most likely cistern site, and then a 45 foot drop from the cistern to the house. There is potential to go a bit higher if need be for better water pressure in the house.) The temperature started cooling as the day came to a close, and Jessie decided to build a fire. Most wood was still wet from the snow, so it started off as an itty bitty fire, and it slowly grew to a bitchin warm campfire that lasted well into the night. Good ole SM walked up, and the three of us sat around that fire for hours, shooting the shit, drinking a little sippy, and eating some little snackies. We told stories and reminisced, and I laughed so hard my smile muscles that extend way up into my scalp were aching. The late night walk down and back up the half mile or so driveway (which is still solid ice) turned out to be the real icing on the funny cake, as SM slipped into a frozen puddle and busted it with her hip and the side of her person (just as Jessie was commenting that it wasn't really all that slick), while Jessie caught all manners of things that were about to fly out of her basket backback, and the laser light reflecting off the snow and ice somehow cracked our shit right up over and over. At one point, Jessie gave me a hand to step across a big slick patch of ice, and in the process some sunglasses that I had forgotten about slipped off the top of my head, and a lens popped out and slid down the mountain on the ice. Imagine three old buddies in the dark coming down a mountain on solid ice just laughing and laughing and laughing. That was us.
Welcome to the project Jessie!