It was a disaster waiting to happen. I mean, we knew it was coming… we just stuck our heads in the sand and hoped that if we pretended everything was fine, that it would be fine.

When we first moved in over a year ago now, we had a problem with the plumbing. The shower started to back up, the sink wouldn’t empty and we got smelly as we waited to the plumber to come fix the problem.

It turned out the pipes under our house were all 1/2 the size they needed to be to carry away grey water from the house. We found a nice plumber who came and replaced all the pipes under the house for us and said he’d be back to replace the rest when we dug them up in the yard to the sullage pit.

Obviously, we didn’t do that. We thought ‘if it ain’t broke’ and carried on like ostriches till the water started to back up again. Last week I timidly said ‘Wayne, if I tell you something, will you promise not to yell?’ Of course he yelled. Words I can’t repeat for fear of being sensored.

But the fact is, we knew it was coming.

So, poor Wayne spent 2 days outside digging up our entire yard. This time, for once, he didn’t accidentally hit a water pipe – he was actually looking for water pipes!

What he hit this time was the phone line.

I wouldn’t have minded, but imagine all the calls from New Delhi telling me I won a cruise to Atlantis if I just buy $50,000 of aluminium siding I missed!

Wayne tried to tell me it was my fault. He said it was all the long distance phone calls I made which stretched the line and wore it out.

This afternoon it looked like WWI in our front yard, trenches everywhere. We had 2 Telstra trucks here as men crawled over the yard trying to find the fault in the line.

Its fixed now, so thats a relief. I would have missed the call from a nice man trying to sell me a new mobile phone otherwise.

z