Septic is in!

A biiiig day today - the septic system and outflow lines are all in.

Savva brought in an excavator to do the digging - and boy, am I glad he did. At one point some time ago I toyed with the idea of digging the trenches myself, but after today I realise that would have been:

a) Totally, unbelievably, inconceivably, futile; and

b) Pretty bloody dangerous!

On his excavator, Jeff had little trouble manoeuvring on the terrain but the rock!! There are rocks he had to pull out of the ground that I doubt the bobcat could lift, let alone dig up. My job was to run around with the bobcat moving gravel, and even that was a bit fraught at times. With a full bucket on flat ground I could only just lift it off the ground before the back wheels lifted; facing downhill it didn't take much at all to tip it over. So I spent most of the time driving around backwards - backwards downhill, backwards uphill!

On a couple of occasions I nearly put the bobcat nose first into the trench - I had to turn to face downhill to empty the bucket, and with too much weight in front (and the occasional rock under the rear wheels) all the machine wanted to do was tip over. It's heart-stopping and looks pretty spectacular, but ultimately it's safe enough - all I have to do is drop the bucket and drive backwards, and it rights itself.

What's not so easy is driving out of a hole. Just once I reversed into one of the pits, and put the machine over on a 45º angle; with two wheels flying in the air there was no getting out of that myself. It took a nudge from Jeff's machine to get out of that one.

No, I didn't get a photo! :)

Speaking of photos, I'll let them do the rest of the talking. Check out them rocks!

All up 180m of trenches 1m wide, and 5 truckloads of gravel in the ground. Now all I have to do is fill the tank with water so it doesn't float out of the ground...