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May. 17th, 2013 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickThe cold water pressure (and only the cold water pressure) at my house is soft. Not sure why. So I was investigating it this morning.
The water gets to my house from a large tank on the hill. It runs down the hill (that's where the pressure comes from) through the water line pipes until it gets to the joint outside my house. The water line joint outside my house is located in an 18" diameter culvert pipe (black plastic, completely smooth on the inside) that is about three and a half feet long and on end in the yard. Most of it is buried in the ground, with about a foot or so sticking up out of the ground so that you don't fall into it by accident. It has sort of a peaked roof on it, but the roof does not sit "down" over the top of the pipe. It just perches across the top of the culvert pipe, such that, well, apparently things can get down into the culvert pipe.
In my investigating of the water situation, I went out to the culvert in the yard and flipped off its little roof to investigate what was inside. Like, maybe the valve was leaking or not all the way on or something. What I found, in the bottom of the culvert, was an opossum, a pretty good-sized, not-dead opossum. It opened its mouth (containing many many freakishly small teeth) and hissed at me.
I investigated the culvert and the opossum. Clearly around the top of the culvert, but SHORT of the top of the culvert, by about six inches, were lots and lots of muddy footprints that I really have to assume belonged to the opossum that was, at that time, quite physically present in the bottom of the culvert. All of the footprints fell short of the actual lip of the culvert, short in a way that would eventually be tragically so for the opossum. The way I figured it, the opossum's best efforts at removing itself from my culvert had already been made, though it yet seemed a fairly lively opossum. (That whole playing dead thing, not so much.)
So then the problem before me, and I would like to state for the record that this problem was before me BEFORE COFFEE AND BEFORE 7 AM, was the problem of an opossum trapped at the bottom of the culvert pipe and going to DIE THERE unless I did something about it.
Neither of my college educations threw up any useful factoids about what to do with an opossum at the bottom of a culvert pipe. Neither education provided me with any actual information about the physical capabilities of an opossum. Can an opossum climb? How well? Can an opossum jump? WTF can an opossum do? How much help am I going to need to render to this damn opossum with its creepy beady eyes and moth-eaten-looking grey fur? Fucking marsupial, anyway.
After some thought on the opossum problem, I got two buckets, a short one (about 1' tall) and a tall one (5 gallon sized). I put both buckets, upside down, into the culvert side by side. There was just enough room left at the bottom of the culvert for the opossum, who was in no way pleased about the addition of buckets to its situation. And then I regarded the (somewhat pissed-off) opossum and the buckets for a time, but not long enough because I had to go to work and do stupid boring shit instead of hanging out in my yard at a discreet distance from the culvert pipe to see if the opossum figured it out or not.
Stupid work.
First thing when I got home from work, I investigated the situation in the culvert in my yard. Both of the buckets had muddy footprints all over them. :) The upper bucket was knocked slightly askew (it didn't sit quite level in the pipe because space was at a premium). And there was no opossum anywhere in sight. Success!
SO. Opossums are dumb enough to climb into culvert pipes on end, the depths of which they do not know until they have fallen non-recoverably-deep into them. However, they are also bright enough, when provided with buckets to climb upon, to get back OUT of a culvert pipe.
Also, cold water pressure at my house is still soft. :( This is probably not due to opossums in the water line joint culvert, at least not anymore.
The water gets to my house from a large tank on the hill. It runs down the hill (that's where the pressure comes from) through the water line pipes until it gets to the joint outside my house. The water line joint outside my house is located in an 18" diameter culvert pipe (black plastic, completely smooth on the inside) that is about three and a half feet long and on end in the yard. Most of it is buried in the ground, with about a foot or so sticking up out of the ground so that you don't fall into it by accident. It has sort of a peaked roof on it, but the roof does not sit "down" over the top of the pipe. It just perches across the top of the culvert pipe, such that, well, apparently things can get down into the culvert pipe.
In my investigating of the water situation, I went out to the culvert in the yard and flipped off its little roof to investigate what was inside. Like, maybe the valve was leaking or not all the way on or something. What I found, in the bottom of the culvert, was an opossum, a pretty good-sized, not-dead opossum. It opened its mouth (containing many many freakishly small teeth) and hissed at me.
I investigated the culvert and the opossum. Clearly around the top of the culvert, but SHORT of the top of the culvert, by about six inches, were lots and lots of muddy footprints that I really have to assume belonged to the opossum that was, at that time, quite physically present in the bottom of the culvert. All of the footprints fell short of the actual lip of the culvert, short in a way that would eventually be tragically so for the opossum. The way I figured it, the opossum's best efforts at removing itself from my culvert had already been made, though it yet seemed a fairly lively opossum. (That whole playing dead thing, not so much.)
So then the problem before me, and I would like to state for the record that this problem was before me BEFORE COFFEE AND BEFORE 7 AM, was the problem of an opossum trapped at the bottom of the culvert pipe and going to DIE THERE unless I did something about it.
Neither of my college educations threw up any useful factoids about what to do with an opossum at the bottom of a culvert pipe. Neither education provided me with any actual information about the physical capabilities of an opossum. Can an opossum climb? How well? Can an opossum jump? WTF can an opossum do? How much help am I going to need to render to this damn opossum with its creepy beady eyes and moth-eaten-looking grey fur? Fucking marsupial, anyway.
After some thought on the opossum problem, I got two buckets, a short one (about 1' tall) and a tall one (5 gallon sized). I put both buckets, upside down, into the culvert side by side. There was just enough room left at the bottom of the culvert for the opossum, who was in no way pleased about the addition of buckets to its situation. And then I regarded the (somewhat pissed-off) opossum and the buckets for a time, but not long enough because I had to go to work and do stupid boring shit instead of hanging out in my yard at a discreet distance from the culvert pipe to see if the opossum figured it out or not.
Stupid work.
First thing when I got home from work, I investigated the situation in the culvert in my yard. Both of the buckets had muddy footprints all over them. :) The upper bucket was knocked slightly askew (it didn't sit quite level in the pipe because space was at a premium). And there was no opossum anywhere in sight. Success!
SO. Opossums are dumb enough to climb into culvert pipes on end, the depths of which they do not know until they have fallen non-recoverably-deep into them. However, they are also bright enough, when provided with buckets to climb upon, to get back OUT of a culvert pipe.
Also, cold water pressure at my house is still soft. :( This is probably not due to opossums in the water line joint culvert, at least not anymore.
