This just in from Mount Ararat!

Our water situation is getting back to normal. Since our flood, we've had a temporary, leaky repair connecting us to the city water. On Thursday morning I realized that I hadn't checked the little puddle around our water meter for a while. I wandered over to the meter and noticed that the road had had lines painted on it and that the asphalt had been cut. I dashed back into the house to get the camera. By the time I was walking out to take pictures of the progress a city employee had driven up. He told me that they were going to do the repair that day.

Here's the road before it got dug up. Our connection to the water main is under the orange cone.
By the way, the cars in the background are stopping. There are a couple of schools about a mile and a half down the road. Most of these cars are Mommies taking their kids to the schools, one student per car. That's the way I usually go to work. The last time I decided to get in the line of cars that backed up to our neighborhood it took me more than an hour to go that mile and a half. I took another route to work Thursday. It probably wouldn't have taken that long this time. The very slow day was a result of the road being closed at the schools so everybody had to detour past the schools and through Kit Carson Park.

Here's the progress that they made by the time Jerry got home from work Thursday.
They had to replace the pipes for us and two of our neighbors.

They took off our meters and hooked the water directly to our pipes. Free water! Too bad we didn't need to fill our pool that night. Wait, we don't have a pool.They got an early start on their work on Friday morning. As I was driving off to work they had taken up the steel plates from their trench and somebody was working in it. One of my neighbors on the far side of the trench was trying to drive somewhere and couldn't get across the trench. Our public servants didn't think to leave a way for the citizens to get from one side of the trench to the other while they did their work. I'm sure they quickly got our neighbor back on his way.

When we got home they were pretty much done except for repaving the road.

Whenever I see a "Steel Plates Ahead" sign I have a flashback to childhood. For some reason I had a feeling that there was a high likelihood that I had had some long forgotten head injury or disease that needed to be repaired by brain surgery. They probably removed some of my skull and replaced it with a steel plate. Jack got us a metal detector to let us search for lost jewelry in city parks for fun and profit. Finally, I had the ability to find out once and for all whether I had a steel plate in my head! I didn't. (Still don't. Wait! I don't have a metal detector. How do I know?)

Here are the steel plates (but they're not in my head!).

And the boxes with our reinstalled water meters.
I wonder how long it will take to get the road repaired.

(Thanks, Jerry, for taking some of these pictures!)