This was the scene this morning as I gazed out of my (very dirty) living room window.

Haven't we done this before?

Yep. Same scene, November 2007.

The same two guys fixed our water line today. The baby-faced backhoe driver has grown a beard over the past two years, which is reassuring. When you have a man directing heavy equipment that near to your house, you like to know they've made it through puberty.

This time, we had not just one leak, but two. Apparently, we have some sort of strange soil chemistry that caused the brand new copper water line to corrode, pit and leak like a sieve. Lucky us!

The good news about all of this? After it was all over, we had easy access to lots of freshly dug soil to use for our "worm parfait" science experiment.

Hopefully the night crawlers will survive. They're hardy creatures, but you've got to wonder what is in soil that burns holes through metal.  

You'd best back away from the dirt, guys.