2007_08_11 Deck started - Septic tank in - field to follow

We didn't go to the log home on Thursday or Friday since we got our Jeep detailed (it'd been years since the last wax job) on Thursday and Kathy had to get her new glasses lenses on Friday in B'ham. So, today (Saturday) we drove up there to see what had happened in our absence.

The deck is going up slowly. It will eventually go all the way around the house so Kathy can drive all the way around in her power chair if she want to do so.

Here's Kathy sitting on the front porch deck.

Wave to Kathy!!!

The septic tank is installed. The thing looks wider than I expected, but I guess that's good. The drain field has been delayed some. The Infiltrator system has not yet been done. I'd guess it will be on Monday. The pieces of it are down there in the woods by one of the bulldozers ready for next week. I suspect that Jerry's wife's surgery may have kept him busy longer than he originally thought.

Below you can see where the sewer pipe comes out of the house and goes down to the septic tank.

This was shot from up on the sub-floor looking down nearly 20 feet to see the entire septic tank and where the pipes come out to start down the hill further to the drain field.

Here is a picture of the deck in progress. The 6" x 6" pressure treated pine posts that support it are resting on the concrete footers that they poured the other day.

We had a problem getting Kathy back to the Jeep after this visit. We parked the Jeep up on the road and I helped her get down the hill to the house so she could sit on her front porch for the first time. With me on one side and her cane on the other we made it down fairly well.

Then she spent about 15 minutes walking around letting her look at things from the first floor. When we started back to the Jeep things started to get scary. It was hot today (102 degrees when we left home to drive up there) as it has been for the last week or more and it was still hot since it was only about 4:00 or so.

Almost immediately her legs ceased to function. At first she just couldn't tell where they were going and then it got worse. Before we got 20 feet away from the deck she became almost completely unable to use her legs. I was trying to hold her up and help pull her up the hill, but she wasn't able to use her legs at all and slowly collapsed on me. I tried to keep her from going to the ground, but she insisted that she just had to lie down and rest.

Well, that was the beginning of what was almost the end! Rather than walk she tried to crawl up the hill. However, she couldn't keep herself up on her hands and also couldn't get her legs raised up to get a knee on the ground. You can see that this is getting serious quickly!

I tried to pick her up, but she couldn't help at all and the days when I could pick her up and carry her over the threshhold are long gone (with my back disc problems and spinal stenosis and also that pesky loss of muscle!) and getting her up that hill with loose dirt was not really going to happen.

Well, it ended up with her having to lie face down in the dirt a couple of times to try to rest and a couple of times on her back and once on her side. This is with her with her hair down in the dirt, sweating, breathing hard and telling me multiple times that she couldn't help at all and she just needed to rest!

I kept telling her that she couldn't just stay there on the ground because it was just going to get worse rather than better and if we couldn't figure how to get her to the car soon I was going to have to either go get a neighbor to help or call 911 and see if the volunteer firemen could help us.

I kept trying to grab her under the arms and pull her up into a standing position, but she couldn't use her legs to remain there so down she'd go again.

Eventually, she had managed to skin up both her knees and burn her hands on the hot rocks. I decided that the only way we were going to get up the hill was for me to just grab both arms and pull her up the hill on her back. So that's what I finally did, but when we got up to the car we still couldn't get her into the front seat.

I picked her up and managed to get her trunk onto the front seat with her face down and her across the seat at an angle, but we couldn't get either of her legs inside the car since they wouldn't bend enough to get past the door frame. I then went and turned the Jeep on so the air conditioning could blow on her while we figured out what to try next.

I finally had to go backwards to get further forward. By that I mean that I had to grab her around the trunk (her's not the Jeep's) and haul her back out of the Jeep into what would normally be a standing position, but she couldn't stand. I somehow managed to turn her around enough to get her rear end on the side of the seat and let her lie back into the Jeep.

I managed to push her feet into the floorboard enough to get the door shut. We finally were able to drive back home with the A/C on high all the way. That took about 40 minutes. By then she had recovered enough that she could get inside the house with her walker. I made her get in the shower to clean up while I washed her shoes and clothes. Then I showered and we got dressed and then Rose and Merrill came over. They brought dinner and we watched TV till ... well, we're still watching it at 1:53 am!

The ordeal of getting up the hill took about 30 minutes. I took a couple of pictures of her while she was lying flat out on the hot dirty hillside resting for a minute. I took the pictures to remind us to never let her try to go up the hill again! I won't include them in this blog although I kept them on our computer to remind us of our near disaster.

It was a day to remember (I'm afraid!). It was also Clay's 31st birthday!