Moving Iron Pipes

February 14th (Friday)

I know you won’t be reading this until much later, but Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone!!

While we were doing our Spanish lessons in the morning, Dorothy came by. When we had been talking to her last week she had mentioned that they were going to try to get a large pile of old, metal piping moved. We had offered our help, and she was coming by to say that they were going to work on moving it then, and that our help would be appreciated. 

They had been having a lot of work done on the municipal building, and the piping was what had been torn out from the old plumbing. As we arrived, Dorothy was giving John directions as he backed up his trailer, and then we all started to untangle the pile of pipes.

The pipes were piled in a somewhat, modern-art like pile, similar to a towering game of giant's pickup sticks. To add a level of complexity to the game, most of the pieces were not straight, but had a “Y” or a “T” branch in them, and some even turned a hard 90-degree corner. The pile had to be disassembled from the top down, and often one piece had to be partially moved to get the next piece out, before the first piece could come out completely. The pipes were made of cast iron, and since some of them were up to four inches in diameter, with couplings, they were quite heavy.  

When we had about two-thirds of the pile loaded up we decided we had best do it in two trips. The back end of the trailer was riding very low, and the road over to the metal recycle area was full of potholes and bumps. Dorothy and I followed in her truck, as Jason and John drove ahead along the road, at one point Dorothy and I stopped to pick up a piece of pipe that had come off of the trailer. 

Just as we were heading back to the municipal building with an empty trailer, Gladys showed up to help. We got the rest of the metal loaded into the back of one of the trucks, and took it to the recycle pile to unload. I think it worked out well that Jason and I were able to lend a hand, and we were happy to help out the people who had been so helpful and kind to us.

In the afternoon Dorothy came by again to give us a bag of freshly picked cherry tomatoes off of her indoor plants. What a treat!!

I also made us chocolate, chocolate chip, huckleberry cupcakes with the last bag of our frozen huckleberries from Discovery Bay from when my parents had helped us pick them last August. The cupcakes turned out delicious.