Mr. Fix It

Last Saturday, I finally got around to doing the annual ritual of messing around with the sprinkler system. I've got a bunch of brown spots on the yard. Being that I live in a town that was once part of the old west, our sprinklers are still on the irrigated watering system. Every spring when I turn them on, they tend to spray at about 73% capacity as to what they should, thus resulting in brown spots throughout the yard. On our front parking strip, the sprinkler head has sunk and tilted so it only sprays half of what it should. So I turned it on, and started pulling on it to bring it up out of the ground. Well, the water pressure went down on all of the other sprinkler heads all of the sudden. So I pushed it back down, and the pressure went back up. But after a minute or two, the grass I was standing over began to swell up like a balloon. I hurried and shut it off, and then tapped on the grass like I would tap on my belly to watch it jiggle. It jiggled. Great! Now I've got a broken sprinkler, something that I have never messed with in all of my Mr. Fix It events in my life. Crazy I know... this was a first for me. Could someone call a plumber??? Anywho, I took a round headed shovel and made an incision from the sprinkler head to the swell in the grass. I cut out almost a U shape, and folded it over. MUDDY MUDDY. This was a dirty job. I even had to us an empty can of Lays potato chips that I pulled out of the garbage can as a tool to emppty the water from the area. Thats prettymuch a Macgyver move. Fortunately for us, we ran into some members of our ward over at the Wal-mart earlier, and at about this time, they rolled up to our house just-in-time for me to ask them if they were plumbers. They weren't. But, they gave us a huge box of baby diapers that they intended on giving to a family member of theirs, but never did. Thanks! Plus, they saw my dirty dilemma and aided in the fixing of the sprinkler. The original pipe had simply slipped off, and needed to be glued back on. They borrowed me the glue. Thanks! I put all of the dirt back in, packed it down, sewed up the incision in the grass (basically laid it back in line from where I cut it with the round mouth shovel), and that was it. I'm now officially Mr. Fix It! The attached glorious photos were taken by the Lovely Karla with my cell phone. There is a in the middle of the mess and after the mess photos here. Enjoy...If a picture could only talk.......