Poo Wars - Originally posted May 2006

I think I mentioned in the third or fourth update that the neighbours dog keeps crapping on our yard. Well, there have been some updates since then that pertain to this story. First of all, the dog is still crapping on our land. Every once in a while we come home from town or come out of the house to leave for town and there’s a nice big one waiting for us. It’s weird having to watch where you step on a 25,000 sq meter piece of land that is yours and you don’t even have a dog. The big dog is even doing it now. We can tell because his are much bigger. I’m sure you all find this very interesting (NOT), but there is a build up to this story I assure you.

A little side step. We signed the contract finally for our place. It’s officially ours now as of last Tuesday (April 18th, 6 days after the deadline). See how long stuff takes in this country?! We put our money down for this place in the middle of December and BAM! 4 months later it’s ours. The reason I side step is because I want you to know that only one week after taking complete ownership of the place our first big problem came up. It all starts with a clogged toilet.

We didn’t clog it even though we’ve been using it for the last couple of months. Like it’s not bad enough that the toilet is outside now it doesn’t work thanks to the old stuff that’s been sitting in there for two years and, well, let’s use the word petrifying. That’s enough description. Sooooo being the responsible people that we are we decide to hire a plumber to come out and take a look at it. The reason I mention that we are responsible people is because you would be amazed at the solutions (or lack thereof) that some people here come up with. You’ll see some really good examples in a second.

So the plumber came. Took a look at the problem and actually fixed it. All within 20 minutes which is great because plumbers are not cheap. We all know that. DONE, RIGHT?! Nope. While fixing this problem the plumber came upon another problem. I’m not going to gross you out with the details (and it is gross), but what it all comes down to is this. Any place in the country here does not have direct plumbing. Generally what happens is you have a septic tank where waste filters into and once a year you get a truck to come by and clean out the tank. This is pretty standard. Anyone with a place on Georgian Bay knows this. Well, it turns out ours is full.

We’ve only been there for 2 months now so it’s obvious to us that it was not emptied in a while since the last time someone lived here was two years ago. We only found out the day before that we have a septic tank (keep in mind we’ve lived in cities all our lives; both Miguel and I) and now we find out that it’s full. So we get it emptied no problem right? Wrong! We can’t find the septic tank. We know where it is because the guy who sold us place told us yesterday when we called him to ask what sort of plumbing we have to start off with. It’s 3 meters down and 15 meters from the house. But it’s not there! Where is it? Well, it turns out it is there.

The neighbour came out and informed us that the tank is there, but the guy who owned the property before buried it under a bunch of rocks so he could build a ramp to the other part of his land which, by the way, now belongs to the realtor who sold us the land. I have a hard time believing that he had no idea that this thing was buried under the ramp to his new land. Especially since he knew its exact location in meters. The neighbour told him he couldn’t bury it like that, but he didn’t listen. The only thing I can think of is that the guy wanted to sell the land separately and figured he needed to build an access to the second lot, but was too lazy to move the tank to another location. So now we have a full septic tank that we can’t access to empty and it isn’t even on our land anymore, but now on the land of the realtor who sold it to us and neglected to mention that it’s buried and the final kick is that because the tank is full it is now leaking into the neighbours field. So in a way we’ve kind of got the advantage in the crapping on each others land competition.

I’ll leave off with one final piece of news that is brand spanking new because it just happened today and that is that Miguel and I took a little trip with our new bike club here in Antequera.

We did a 35km cycling trip which doesn’t sound like much except it was up The Sierra Nevada (The original, not the one in California of course). Three hours later and 2,200 meters (7,000 feet) higher we were at the tip of the town Sierra Nevada and yes there is snow in Spain if you go high enough.

I’m looking forward to skiing season this coming October. I haven’t skied for years since I would refuse to pay to SKATE down Blue Mountain in Ontario (I missed Banff severely). Apparently there over 6 million skiers in Spain.