I'll be offline for a while...

I'll be offline for a while, sadly.

Our neighbors had problems with their plumbing and ended up calling in a backhoe to redo some pipes. While that was going on, they cut OUR sewer line.

Okay... So, they cut our sewer line. They're gonna fix it... Right?

Nope.

Turns our our sewer line was built 90 years ago and had originally tied into the neighbor's sewer line, then both went out to the street into the sewer... Fine and dandy, except they changed the city code a few years ago, and now each house has to have it's own sewer line.

Okay... Now the city inspector is involved.

"But I didn't do anything wrong," I said. "Yesterday we were happy, now we have no sewer. What do we do?"

He told us that either we reroute our sewer line or he's going to have our house red-tagged for demolition. "Okay," I asked, "how much will that cost?" He didn't know, nor did he seem to care a whole lot, but the figure $8,000 to $10,000 kept coming up in conversation.

That's nearly a third of the value of our house.

Needless to say, we can't get a loan for $10,000 -- I just quit my job last week. We don't have that much equity in the house. But if we don't get the money, they'll tear our house down.

Dagmar's sobbing right now.

Thank God Dagmar's mother is willing to let us stay in her basement (which is really nice).

So... Our neighbors had some work done in their yard, now we have to move until the situation is fixed, find $10,000 in the next few hours, and there's a very real possibility we'll lose our house.

In any case, I'll be without Internet for the most part for the next couple weeks. I'll probably leave my computer hooked up here at the house for the rest of today, but then we gotta move.