I heard back from MetLife today, and they've authorized full payment of my claim. The check should be mailed tomorrow and will probably arrive here Tuesday. I signed the contract with Nelco and returned it, and they'll probably begin work on Tuesday as well. Our total cost will be just under $1,200, about $800 of which we can afford to pay now, and the rest will have to wait until I get paid at the end of February. I'm relieved that the insurance company didn't give us any problems, but I'm still not entirely at ease. I keep thinking of everything that can still go wrong, leaving me to deal with even more crap than I'd originally bargained for. I'm just afraid that we'll spend money fixing this, then something else will pop up and need attention, and we'll be invested too far to simply walk away (sort of like all the problems I had with my truck).

Here's a nifty list for armed robbers to consult before planning their next hold-up.

Neil from Nelco came over today and gave me a written proposal for replacing the sewer line. The total came to over $7,500, but our part only amounts to $688, plus the $500 deductible. I think that's something we can live with, though it'll take two months for us to get enough cash to pay for it all. Traci just went to her mom's work to fax a copy of the proposal to MetLife, and they're supposed to get back to us within a day or two with what will almost certainly be an adjusted amount that they're willing to pay. Hopefully we won't get it up the ass too badly. Oh yeah, it's probably time to get the house payment mailed out.

I'd love to get one of these Kydex holsters--I wonder if the "accessories" shown are included. (May not be safe for work)

Heh, copycats: Ubink, Unink, Usink, Uwink, and Uzink.

I just heard from Neil at Nelco, and he gave me the low-down on what they've decided to do so far, though the estimate won't be ready until tomorrow. He said that instead of just replacing the sewer line under the street, they're going to start excavating right at the foundation of the house and work their way out into the street in order to avoid having to locate the line under the pavement (so they'll only tear up a minimum of the street). They'll bore under the sidewalk and the trees in front of my house, which I'm grateful for--I like those trees. They'll also have to close this portion of 300 East completely, so it looks like my mom's street and 400 East will be seeing a lot more traffic when they start work. They're expecting to have problems with the water table, so they may have to pump water out of the trench and they'll definitely have to shore up the sides, since the layout of my yard won't allow for a very wide trench. They're going to put an allowance for landscaping in the estimate as well, but they'll leave that part up to me since it will be months before sod could be laid down.

This job is already bigger than anybody expected, and Neil said that it was going to be very expensive. I won't know until tomorrow how much my part of it will cost, so we're not 100% sure that we'll proceed with the repairs. I'm just glad that my homeowner's insurance will cover almost all of it. If my part comes to less than about $1,500, I think we'll be able to handle that much. Somebody came over to look at the camper yesterday, and selling that would help a great deal. We still haven't paid the house payment that's due on February 1--tomorrow should decide whether the check gets dropped in the mail, or goes towards getting a new place.

I called Nelco last week to have them come out and give me an estimate on replacing the sewer line, and they said it probably wouldn't be ready until tomorrow. The big holdup has been getting all the underground utilities marked before they can determine where to dig. They called Blue Stakes late Thursday, and by early Friday morning the power and telephone companies had been out, and Price City and Questar marked their lines this morning. The guys I talked to at Nelco said they'd make the estimate for replacing the line between the curb and the sewer main, so hopefully any problems in my line are in that section (if not, they can simply revise the estimate and my insurance company should still pay). When I told them that my insurance company was paying for the excavation and restoration, and that I only had to pay for the actual pipe replacement, they said I was getting off easy. It doesn't seem like replacing 40 or 50 feet of pipe could cost too much, so hopefully they're right.

I got a postcard in the mail today, reminding me of my ten-year high school reunion. After looking at the class picture, it seems like much longer ago than ten years. I have no desire to actually go to the reunion, since I'm still in contact with the people I really wanted to stay in contact with. But it might be fun to go anyway, as long as the rest of my friends from high school will be going too.

The hike I took today out by Mounds was pretty nice. I parked my truck on the southeast end of the reef and hiked northwest about six miles along the edge of the reef, then walked back to the truck on the dirt road for about three miles. I didn't find any cool fossils like I'd hoped to, but I did find a lot of small ones like I found last weekend. I also took some pretty nice pictures, and saw eight antelope--they startled me by running out across the road from behind a hill about 100 yards ahead of me, and I stopped the truck and they eventually stopped to look back at me. I sat and watched them through binoculars for five minutes, then headed back up the road towards home. I wish I could have stayed out longer, but the temperature was just starting to dip below freezing when I got home, so I suppose it wasn't a bad idea to leave early.

Some interesting webcams from the Emery Water Conservancy District.

All is not lost...yet. I've heard back from my homeowner's insurance, and they'll cover digging up the sewer line and restoring the land after the excavation, and all I'll have to pay is a $500 deductible and the actual cost of replacing the pipe. That's a big relief, since digging up 300 East (which is technically State Route 283) will be costly in itself, but they may also have to remove one of the trees in front of my house, and possibly the sidewalk and part of my front yard, and who knows what else. I'm going to get ahold of a general contractor today to get somebody out here for an estimate, and then we'll decide how to proceed. The contractor will have to give two different estimates--one for the insurance company's part, and one for my part. If my part isn't going to bankrupt me, then we'll proceed with repairs and go from there. I'd still like to sell the house and get the hell out of here, but that could literally take years.

Wow...Hands-on experience yields a new view on gun control in the Salt Lake Tribune. It's certainly not something you hear about every day.

This weekend, I've tried to forget about all the shit that's been going on lately, so I've spent a lot of time out of the house. This isn't exactly the best time of year for hiking, but that's exactly what I've been doing for the past two days.

Yesterday, I found a geocache just outside of Wellington, north of Farnham Road. The road was really muddy in spots, snowpacked and slushy in others. I had to park 0.3 miles from the cache, and the walk was easy up until the last 100 yards or so, which was up a steep hill. After finding the cache, I decided to keep going up the hill, climbed the small cliff at the top, and ended up on a flat plateau. I walked towards the east along the edge of the cliff, and eventually found an easy place to climb back down and hike back to the car. All along the way, I found tons of interesting fossils, mostly just shells and the like. I left one behind that I didn't mean to--it was too big to carry for too long a distance, so I left it on top of a boulder and planned on picking it up on my way back to the car. Since I ended up taking a different route back to the car, I forgot about it. I'll go back and get it next weekend, since it was quite different from the rest of the fossils that are common in that area.

Today, I went after another cache in Spring Canyon. Things were pretty uneventful there, but if there had been less snow I would have hiked around quite a bit more. There were elk tracks and droppings literally everywhere. It would have been nice to catch some pictures of that many elk, but it was the wrong time of day--they must've all been bedded down higher up in the mountains.

After finding so many fossils yesterday, I did some searching to see if anybody else had found anything of significance in that area. It turns out that there are a lot of cephalopod fossils in the Mounds Reef just a few miles away. I've only been to Mounds once, last year sometime, and it was a pretty interesting area. There are huge, strangely smooth and round boulders all along the Mounds Reef that look as though they were harder than the surrounding rock, and they're all that's left after the rest eroded away. I'm planning on going there next weekend (that is, if I'm not moving) and spending a lot of time hiking around and digging for fossils. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but I never knew exactly where to look, until now.

I talked to several people at MetLife today to see if my homeowner's policy would cover replacing the sewer line, and nobody there seems to know the answer. Traci called our local agent first, and they said that they didn't know the answer and that we would have to submit a claim in order to find out. I called this morning to do just that, and the woman I talked to told me that they would pay for digging the hole and filling it back in, but that I would have to pay for actually removing the old pipe and laying new pipe (heh, laying pipe). I asked for that in writing, and she said that it's not really written anywhere. I explained to her that I absolutely would not proceed unless I had something in writing specifying what they will and won't cover, so she said to go ahead and make a claim and they would send me something. Later, another woman (a claims adjuster) called me to get some clarification on exactly what the problem was with the sewer line. She told me that generally, they wouldn't cover problems that occur off my property, but since I have it in writing from the Price City Public Utilities Supervisor that all house mains and lateral lines are not the responsibility of the city, she said she would talk to somebody else to see if there's any way that they'd cover this. I'm 100% certain that I'll hear back from her soon, telling me that they won't cover any of it, which will basically make the decision for me: we'll move out--the bank can have the house back.

Since yesterday, we've been pretty sure that circumstances will lead to us moving out, so I went and dug my truck out of mothballs in order to get a head start on the process. I let the registration expire in October and dropped the insurance since the truck wasn't much good to me--it's not 4WD, and my whole family won't fit inside it (not safely, anyway). The only access to my back yard, where I had the truck parked, is through my mom's back yard. There was still a lot of snow back there, and it took me well over an hour to get my truck out onto the street. I tried for most of that time to back it out, only because with the way it was parked in my yard, that was the only way to exit without doing a several-point u-turn, which in the snow would have been impossible. After getting almost to the pavement, I got to a point where my tires just wouldn't grip anything, and the rear-end started sliding sideways into the bushes that line my mom's driveway. After trying that for way too long, I got fed up with trying it in reverse, threw it into second gear and barrelled forward. I managed to turn 90 degrees in a skid at the wide spot at the end of her driveway, then I dug out the snow directly behind me with a snow shovel, backed up, then barrelled all the way out of her driveway going forward, no problems this time. If only I'd tried that from the beginning.

Today, things have at least been moving much more smoothly. On my lunch break, I drove the truck down to get gas (expecting to get pulled over for expired registration, just 'cause that's how my luck has been going), then I went to Grako's to get a safety inspection. Normally, it takes them an hour or longer to get it done, but I was in and out of there in 15 minutes. Not only that, but the heap of shit actually passed! Afterwards, I went to the DMV to register the truck, and again I expected a long wait, but I was the only one there and it only took three minutes. I was so tempted to make some smart-ass remark about whether or not they'd accept a personal check with such obscenities printed on it, but I figured it's not that lady's fault that the DMV's administrators are assholes.

I actually made this new layout for a different section of the site, but I liked it so much that I decided to use it on the main page. All I really had to change was the image on top and the colors, but I think it looks better than the old one--I never really liked that one too much (too dark a background). I looked at this layout on two other computers today, and it looked too green. It looks more gray than green on my LCD monitor, so I may end up re-doing the image and background colors on another computer.

I got a call this morning from the only guy in town available to dig a hole in my front yard to install a sewer cleanout, and he said he wouldn't even be able to do it until Tuesday. He said it would cost $425, but when I told him about the big-ass trees in my front yard, he said that it would cost at least that much to remove the one which is almost directly over the sewer line.

At this point, Traci and I are seriously considering walking away from our mortgage and letting the bank deal with this shit. It can't hurt our credit too badly, since our bankruptcy just discharged 6 months ago, which coincidentally precipitated from god damned sewer problems!

We're just afraid that they'll start digging the sewer line up and discover yet another problem, such as that the entire line needs to be replaced. If that had to be done they'd have to dig up half of 300 East, which is technically a state highway, which apparently can get expensive. Not to mention I'd have to replant the grass in my entire front yard, replace my sprinkler system, re-landscape the entire yard, and they'd probably have to remove my front porch just to get down to the foundation where the sewer line exits. I can barely afford the minimum $425, so there's no way I'd be able to pay for everything else.

The guy said he'd try to stop by this weekend to see about that tree, so depending on what he thinks about it, Traci and I are prepared to tell him to forget about it. I'd rather be in financial ruin for the next seven years than commit to paying for this shit hole and all the repairs that it needs for the rest of my life.

Update: Ok, here's the deal. What would you do in my situation? Here are my options as I see them:

1. Borrow money (probably $5,000 or more, which I can't afford) to fix the entire sewer line, and continue living here, while hoping that no more problems arise. Considering how poor the condition of the city's sewer main is on this street, we would risk another sewer backup by staying.

2. Don't fix the sewer, but try to sell the house. I would have to take a loss on the house since the sewer line doesn't work, but my credit wouldn't be ruined quite as badly. Also, the house could take a very long time to sell, leaving us to live here without a sewer connection (which is impossible).

3. Walk away from the mortgage, live in a trailer court somewhere and save money for the next several years in the hopes that we can eventually be approved for a loan and live in a decent home.

The damned sewer line in my house is blocked yet again, and this time the plumber wasn't able to push past it with his snake. Somebody should be coming by tomorrow to start digging up the line to install a cleanout near the curb, and they'll try to clear the blockage while they've got it exposed. The blockage is literally out in the middle of the street, almost right at the city's sewer main. I'm really fucking sick of this house, and we're thinking about moving now. Even if we could afford to fix all the sewer problems, that wouldn't guarantee that the city's main wouldn't back up again, and that's something neither Traci nor myself could handle emotionally. I'm about ready to start throwing bullets right now as it is, so let's hope that nothing else goes wrong.

As much as I love playing in the snow, it just hasn't been as fun without a vehicle to take out in it. I'm ready for spring to be here, mostly so I can start hiking again. I've actually been hiking each of the past two weekends, but the snow kept me from hiking as far as I'd have liked. The first hike was behind Kenilworth, sometimes through two feet of snow, and the second one was out by Pinnacle Peak, looking for a geocache. I'm surprised that I managed to find the cache--it was described as being in a 5-gallon bucket, so I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to find, even with 8" of snow on the ground. I didn't count on it being buried, and I only found it by chance just before I was about to give up looking. Luckily, it was under a large flat rock, which made just a big enough bulge in the snow for me to want to dig around it a little bit.

Anyhow, I'm really getting stoked for warmer weather because of these two caches, which are on top of this formation in the San Rafael Reef. The hike will actually begin on this side of the Reef, and as you can see in the right side of that picture, it's quite a steady incline all the way to the top. It's over 2 miles from the rest area on I-70 (where those pictures were taken from) to the top of the Reef, and about a 1500-foot gain in elevation--not too bad as long as it's not the dead of summer. According to last year's weather history, the temperature didn't start getting favorable for long hikes until the beginning of March, so it may be two months until I can actually go on this hike. I'm trying to get in shape in order to do a lot more hiking this year, since I plan on doing as many county high peaks as I can, including King's Peak late in the summer (if I don't whimp out, anyway).

Pretty self-explanatory: dontrentfromuhaul.com

It's strange how Michael started crawling at 6½ months, and though Bradley is just past that point, he's not crawling yet. Not that I'm worried about it, because he can still get around without too much trouble--it's just that he pulls his entire body with his arms, without using his legs at all. At least on the hardwood, that's how he does it. On the carpet, he sometimes uses his feet to push himself a little too, but he doesn't ever get up on his knees. I still can't believe how beautiful our two kids are--Traci and I aren't half that good-looking.

This is ridiculous--U-Haul's new company policy forbids renting trailers to be towed behind any Ford Explorer, but Mazda Navajo and Mercury Mountaineer are exempt from the policy.

This about sums up how my brain feels this morning after returning to work after two weeks off:

I don't remember it ever being this cold here, and my furnace is on almost constantly trying to keep up. The snow on the ground prevented me from doing any of the things that I wanted to accomplish while I was on vacation--I had three small carpentry projects and a few automotive projects that I was going to do. The only good thing about this snow, besides helping to break the drought we've had for the past five or six years, is that I got to play in it a few times. Now that I'm back to work, I'll get bummed out if it starts snowing again, since I probably won't have as much time to go out and play.

Traci and I went to Provo/Orem on Monday for dinner and a movie, and to do some clothes shopping. The drive up was really slow because of all the snow, and we decided not to see a movie so we'd have a chance to make it home somewhat early. About halfway through our meal, I started feeling sick, and Traci started feeling the same way not too long after that, so we ended up not even doing much shopping afterwards. I had a migraine the entire drive home, and with that on top of the weather, it made for a really shitty trip.

It's snowing again, and it looks like we'll get quite a bit this time as well, so we're planning on going tubing again tomorrow. When we went last week it was a blast--my sister and her family were there as well. We had the hill to ourselves for more than two hours, except for about a half-hour when a few other people showed up. My camp stove ended up not working so we couldn't have hot chocolate like I'd planned. I've fixed the stove for this time, and I'm planning on bringing wood for a fire too, so it should be a much better time.