Oil, that is.... black gold.... Texas tea.

Before we bought our house, our inspector found a overflow pipe in the yard, indicating the presence of an underground oil tank (for heating oil). The then owners of the house, who had lived here since 1980ish, had always had natural gas heat, and didn't even know the house used to be heated with oil. I knew someone in Oregon who, upon removing his oil tank, discovered that it had leaked (about 3% of underground oil tanks fail), and was forced by the government to clean it up by removing the contaminated earth. It ended up costing him about $80,000.

So, before we bought the house, we had the ground around the tank tested. The tests came back negative, indicating that the tank had not leaked. We had the tank pulled out today. I aimed my videocamera at the work site and hooked it up to my computer, which was running webcam software, so I could watch the work proceed throughout the day. Here are some highlights:

Here's the site on the south side of the house - I pained an "X" on the ground so they would know where to dig. Note the date and time at the top of the image.




The bulldozer goes to work




The top of the tank is cut open with what appears to be a circular saw




The tank's contents are sucked out




Thar she blows! A hump like a snow hill! Well, OK, more like a 550 gallon oil tank, 5 feet long and 4 feet across. It's huge!!




The hole is (mostly) filled in. Tomorrow they will be filling in the hole the rest of the way and reconnecting the electrical connection between the garage and the house that was (oops) severed during the digging.

Of Tables and Telephones

Sunday is usually fix-up-the-house-we-just-moved-into day around here. I finally got around to spraying the mildew in the basement with bleach solution; we'll see if that does the trick.

My parents we're kind enough to buy us a dining room set for our new house. I was perfectly happy using our 8 foot long Office Depot folding table, but Tricia doesn't really appreciate my "steel 'n' chipboard" sensibilities. We chose the Bassett "Options" line, in the "light oak" finish to match our dining room - we got the table with 6 chairs, and a china hutch.

Unfortunately, the table only sits 6 with the 18" leaf installed, and we really wanted a table that seats eight. So, I ordered new table slides from a table slide manufacturer and an extra leaf from Bassett. Today, I installed the new slides - my custom 2 leaf, 8 foot version of the table worked out very well:

I also got around to installing a deadbolt in the dining room door, in addition to the those I installed in the other two doors a couple weeks ago.

A new house is being built in the lot in front of ours, and on Friday the construction team managed to cut of phone cable. The contractor sent his phone guy to fix it today, and they rigged up a temporary solution - we have a phone cable going from tree to tree until it reaches our house. I guess the plan is to properly re-install the phone cable as the construction nears completion.

Shabbos Flowers

Here are the tiger lilies I cut for our table from our garden:

It's Alive!

I guess now that the journal is up and running I should actually enter something into it. Getting this to work was (for me) quite an accomplishment - in the process of getting this going, I learned a bit of XML and XSL, how to use the XMLDOM engine, and a bit of JavaScript.

The idea behind this journal is that I'll be able to quickly add entries when we go on trips, etc. without having to fashion webpages, make links, etc.. Additionally, the main page shows the latest entry, so I don't have to maintain a "log of changes" page.

I hope to soon have a journal up for Tricia and Mechel.