A Monumental Week
It was a bright, crisp morning. The horizon was blanketed by fluffy, pink clouds and the air was rich with the music of songbirds delighting in the early light. The man stood ready, his long hose unrolled. Our eyes met and I smiled, my heart beating in anticipation as he slipped it into the opening.
“This was the moment I had been waiting for, for oh-so-long”
The pump started slowly, methodically, withdrawing everything that had been building for months. An ultimate release. Barely 10 minutes later he was done and everything was gone. It was the end, but I also knew it was just the beginning, the start of a brand new insertion. I ran to Paul to tell him the news, certain he would be as excited as I had been.
“Our old septic tank had been emptied” I gasped “it’s all going to happen today!!”
Ah yes, my mind goes to strange places sometimes. I guess several months of waiting for a new septic tank to be installed has taken it’s toll, and humor is one of the few things that keeps me on-track. That, and happy hour. As I commented to a friend recently, “If I survive this year with my sanity in-tact, I will consider it an act of genius”.
This week at least, my sanity got a welcome respite.
The Septic Installation Finally Happened!!
So yes, as you may have grasped by now our new septic was FINALLY, blissfully installed this week. After mountains of paperwork, months of waiting for various approvals, and weeks of looking at the brand new tank just sitting on our lawn, we actually got it in the ground.
Yipeeeeeeee!
Amazingly, once the work started it went super fast. Much of this was thanks to our wonderful installer, Mr Mammy Pascal, who specializes in terrassement (which basically means “earthworks” or anything to do with digging and moving soil). Mr Mammy not only put up with weeks of anxiety from me, helping to calm and reassure whenever I started to lose hope, but also got the entire septic installed in mere hours.
As soon as our old concrete tank was emptied (the first required step), he dug it up, then proceeded to efficiently dig a new hole for our 4,731 liter Tricel all-in-one sewage treatment tank. Some gravel, some leveling and the new tank was lowered into place. Mere moments later it was connected to the house pipe and ready to be used. Voilà!
Mr Mammy spent the rest of the afternoon digging a trench for the exit pipe to the communal ditch by the road. Then later that evening the Tricel consultant, Mr Darribes came by to hook-up the electricity for the air compressor, and take us through the yearly maintenance steps (basically just a set of simple, manual checks to make sure the compressor stays clean and everything is connected & working). Our 20-year guarantee was launched at the same time.
The only remaining, somewhat stressful part of the whole affair was our inspection the next day by the SMDEA (the water treatment authority for our area). We had all our approvals and felt we’d done everything we could to be “conforme”, but there were still a few potential gotchas, including some “possibly needed” additions that would have required some serious extra construction work. Thankfully the lady from the SMDEA approved us as-is, and declared us good to go. Phew!!!
So there you are. It only took around 15 weeks all-in-all, from June to September or in other words, most of summer, but finally, FINALLY our new septic is installed and working!!!
Let the unabashed poooping begin……
We Sampled A Grainy Experiment
The other new thing we did this week was sample a grainy experiment that I teased you about a few blogs ago.
I’m sure many of you may have guessed that it involved beer, or more specifically home-brewed beer. Technically this was our second attempt at this, having tried a Brooklyn Brew Shop beer kit back in Maine (in the RV) a few years back. That first brew turned out so-so, suffering from rather inadequate temp control in our RV bins, not to mention quite a bit of bashing about as we motored from Maine to Florida.
This time we decided to tighten up our parameters, which is decidedly easier in a fixed-house setting.
We found an excellent online brew shop Brouwland (https://www.brouwland.com/) located in Belgium and bought their Simcoe IPA brew kit, a nice little starter kit that comes complete with yeast, malt, hops, plus all the necessary brew equipment and bottles for the final product. A pleasant afternoon of brewing ensued, including some baking (I made a sumptuous German Biertreberbrot, or spent grain bread from the leftover grains), followed by several weeks of fermentation before we bottled and waited for the product to complete.
The final tasting was done this Thursday, right after our septic inspection, and although it wasn’t quite as exciting as the installation itself, it turned out pretty darn decent. Good hops flavor, decent color, and a pleasant head, but not quite enough depth. So we’ve got a few adjustments to make.
We’ve already got our next grains on order, and are planning the next, next brew which (if good enough) we’ll share with the neighbors too. Plus we’re mulling some other fermentation ideas.
“La brasserie du Sud” may yet come to be….
And So We Go On
And so that’s it for home projects, at least for the moment.
It feels almost….odd…not to be waiting for some kind of approval or another, or not have any immediate house plans. It’s that moment between the moments again, but it also means we’re free, at least for a while. So we’re plotting, thinking, maybe even daring to believe that the motorhome might go out for another spin? We’ll see.
In the meantime we have beer, and we can poop. That’s a lot to be thankful for….
My question for you this week, my friends. Have you ever home-brewed? Or home-fermented something else? Any good tips? Or interesting brew stories? DO share below!
We made a decent elderberry wine that actually tastes a lot like a fine tawny port (after about 5 years in our cold cellar).
Oooooo…..how interesting!! A fine Tawny port is lovely, so anything approaching that would be fabulous. I will look-up elderberry wine.
Nina
Congratulations on the new Septic system. I’m sure it will give many, many years of loyal service.
Fingers crossed! I sure hope we won’t have to think about it again for a long, long time.
Nina
Thanks for another wonderful post. Home brew takes me way back to many memories. It first started in Saudi [Jubail] in the late 70’s, when you could not find or buy anything to drink that would not hurt you, there was one culture there that would drink anything, but no names here. Three of us decided to build and operate stills, not pot stills like in moonshine, but real process stills with packed reflux columns all stainless and copper. I could make 187 proof on the second run. No smell, no taste, no hangover. Did this in a secure compound. Beer was on a later Saudi hitch when I did not want to get into the still business, or drink spirits. The secret was to get good hops and beer yeast at this place in Houston to go with non alcoholic beer, which we could buy. The recipe was very important to create a dry pilsner with low residual sugar. Took a lot of work to clean the snap over apple juice bottles, but the result was wonderful and not just for Saudi on a hot day after the beach, think Carlsberg. The stuff had to stay in air conditioning due to the pressure buildup. Power outages resulted in the bottoms of the bottles being blown off. The funniest business was the wine. When I got to another Saudi job, again in Jubail, people were making this stuff that was too sweet and too everything else, almost not drinkable. But, as with the ugly baby story, they thought it might the best in the camp. Nothing to do but for me to organize the “First Annual Jubail Bacchus Society Celebrity Wine Tasting and Competition”. Coats and ties for men, dresses for women. Two men and two women [very funny people] judges doing blind tasting and judging the many submitted bottles of white and red to a full house [double wide trailer]. The judges had their glasses filled and then the bottles were passed around to the twenty plus attendees. There were three prizes: first, second and regrettable. Somehow [could it have been rigged?] the construction VP and project director [very competitive man] received “regrettable” for his red wine entry, it did not go down well. I knew the party was at an end when the bartender started mixing the whites and reds together and nobody cared.
Thanks again for your stories and photographs.
Very sexy, your romance with the septic tank man…
AND: CONGRATULATION!
Hahaha….thanks 🙂
Nina
Sounds like a very satisfying experience :-)))
small pleasures make life in the time of COVID bearable…..wink wink
Indeed….we must take solace where we can 😉
Nina
Will sticking to the question of Homebrew it can be answered in two ways Homebrew for humans the answer is no but in my case Homebrew was made in large large quantities for the theme of animals it looks the same as your Homebrew it’s mixed about the same as your Homebrew but I wouldn’t drink it it smells like Homebrew but I got to tell you something this really kind of funny when it was poured out there was not an one left that wasn’t at the table ready to drink and eat I mean they would fight for position they loved it like you can’t believe they put on a lot of weight from it but then again I must cautiont you that my home brew it was being made was in 55 gallon barrels there was 10 – 16 of them they were three barrels to a day so I’m going to tell you that our hogs were fat little butter balls and they were the best tasting hams chops and sausage you can ever buy in fact most of the stuff was in contract to the army you see my father for his part in the wars in other efforts was feeding all the war heroes whether it was generals or foot soldiers I’m sure they all ate our food we would have to fatten 250 fatback hogs every 3 months to meet our quota and we also had to have 40 cases of eggs every 2 weeks to meet our colorful eggs so yeah The Homebrew was great it’s just I couldn’t drink it I couldn’t even smell the stuff after a while it would become such a problem for me but a lot of people are really really good at Homebrew and you seem to be a couple that is. The best wishes to you and hope you come up with the greatest recipe ever so in closing all I can say is cheers and thank you for listening.
Hi,
Did I read it right that the outflow from your septic tank goes into a “community ditch”?
Well I wrote “communal ditch” but it’s probably the wrong terminology I’m sure, as I’m translating from French. It’s the water-flow ditch that runs alongside the country road, managed by the commune. And yes, the output from our septic treatment is essentially clean water, so it can be safely discharged there. It’s one of the very reasons we chose that particular system.
Nina
I have only tried Kombucha so far. That brew looks nice. Congrats on the septic service. That has to be a huge relief!
We are moving into a house we bought in Mount Vernon, Wa. The whole COVID situation has caused us to abandon our full time RV lifestyle. We are planning to travel part time, though.
Love your stories from France, thank you so much for sharing.
I’m sorry to hear your full-time travels are coming to an end, but I totally and completely get it. We’re honestly quite happy to have a “base” now, especially during these crazy COVID times. I do think part-time travel is going to be our future from now on.
Nina