Our plan for San Diego is to hit three of its big tourist attractions in three days. First up is the San Diego Zoo. The moment we get there, all five kids are yelling that they want to see the pandas, so that’s where we head first. They spend about two minutes looking at the actual live pandas, then spend about ten minutes selecting a panda toy from the enormous array of panda merchandise at the panda area’s gift shop. The rest of the day is the usual assortment of interesting zoo animals. The two boys are especially excited by a mid-afternoon ride over the park in the little gondola cars they have. This takes us to a far corner of the park, but by this point no one has the energy to walk all the way back to the zoo entrance. As we’re deciding what to do, a zoo bus pulls up, which we gratefully ride back to the front of the park.
Back at the hotel, all five kids are delighted to spend the rest of the afternoon in the pool. In the evening, Angela’s cousin Janet Tsai and her husband John take us to a great Chinese restaurant for dinner. Jan couldn’t attend their wedding last year; the last time he’d seen Janet was back in 1999, when she was only 16.
Today’s tourist attraction is SeaWorld. The day starts with a stop at the dolphin pool, where Liya gets the chance to throw a fish to one of the dolphins. After that, we head to the big orca show stadium; they’re only performing one orca show this day, and we want to make sure we catch it. Most of our group sits near the top of the “Soak Zone”, so called because splashes from the orca’s jumping and tail flips get people in the very closest rows pretty wet. Anthony is deathly afraid of getting wet, however, so he makes Johnny take him to seats high up and well outside the Soak Zone. As it turns out, we’re still high enough that don’t get wet at all. Later, by the “tidal pool” touch tank, the kids take turns touching starfish. (Anthony once again demurs.) Bree has fun in the fresh water aquarium building pointing out some of the fresh water fish we have in our tank. “Daddy! I’ve never seen so many neons before in my life!”
Dinner is at a Thai place near the beach. Angela’s dad, Cheng-nan, smiles throughout the meal, happy to preside over a gathering of his two kids and all his grandkids.
Our third and final San Diego-area attraction is Legoland. As it turns out, Anthony and Brian visit Legoland multiple times a year, so they (and their father, Johnny) each know the park like the back of their hand. We manage to get to the park entrance just before it opens, and there’s a nice moment of anticipation as everyone’s squirming in line on a sunny morning while some excitement-building music plays in the background.
The moment the park opens, Brian leads Anya, Liya, and Jan straight to the “Project X” roller coaster. Jan’s not a big roller coaster fan, but this one is mild (as are the rest of the Legoland roller coasters, it turns out). Bree’s not up for roller coasters, but she does enjoy some of the rides, like an airplane ride Angela takes her on. She and her sisters and cousins also enjoy getting to drive boats around a course, and the “Kid Power Tower” in which they get to pull their chair up the outside of a tower and then let it gently drift back down. Bree’s also delighted to get her face painted in shades of pink and purple.
Legoland (continued). Just before lunch, Anya, Liya, and Anthony participate in a short hands-on robotics class. There’s not much time for the instruction to explain much, but it’s interesting enough that all three kids have some fun programming a little Lego robot to drive around a table-top scene that’s (very) roughly modeled after an Indiana Jones movie.
The drive back to Rancho Palos Verdes is late in the afternoon, and consequently takes much longer than the drive down (in light mid-day traffic) had been. Johnny makes a stop to pick up some great take-out from a noodle spot called Eboshi, so we can dig into a great dinner as soon as we get home.
After four days of travel and touristy stuff, we’re happy to spend the day hanging around Johnny and Zenni’s house. The girls and their cousins spend most of the day building forts. In the afternoon, Angela drives to the new Long Beach home of her cousin George and his wife Julie. They just moved to Long Beach a few weeks ago, and we’re happy their new location close to Johnny and Zenni means we’ll get to see them more often. Angela brings their two boys, Jaden and Carson, back to Johnny and Zenni’s house, so the afternoon is one long screaming, laughing fit of seven young cousins. We finally take them all out to a park so they can burn off some more energy running around playing tag.
At dinnertime, we meet up at Curry House with George and Julie for a modest family reunion: our family five, plus Johnny and Zenni’s family of four, plus George and Julie’s four, plus Angela and Johnny’s parents. Afterwards, we walk around the corner to a frozen yogurt place. (From left: Brian, Liya, Carson, Jaden, Anthony, Sabriya, Anya)
We head back to Seattle. The flight back is fine, and after all the holidays, we’re all happy to settle back into our home.
A small disaster. This morning, Jan is walking with Anya and Liya down to the garage for the drive to school, and when Anya steps into the dark garage, we hear a splash. There’s an inch of water in the garage. Worse, it’s murky gray water backing up out of the driveway drain. (Insurance companies euphemistically refer to this as “black water”.) The same water is also backing up out of a drain in the downstairs bathroom, and water is seeping from the garage into the adjacent guest room.
We do what we can to quickly move boxes, books, and whatnot out of the guest room and away from the slowly but inexorably rising water. That done, we do what we can with our wet/dry shop vacuum to start moving the water, but there’s already quite a bit of it, it’s going to take forever. Thankfully, one of our neighbors comes by to offer the use of his sump pump, which does a fairly good job of lowering the water.
Meanwhile, we call a plumbing crew to start working on finding and fixing the problem. It takes them quite a while to find the block, but they eventually locate it outside the house, in the main sewage line leading from our home to the street. Separately, we call a flood recovery outfit, who arrive and start setting up enormous dehumidifiers, air blowers, and so forth, in an effort to start drying out the affected rooms.
The plumbing crew has to dig a big hole in our yard to get down to the problem 5’ beneath the surface. When they finally clear it, they send a camera up and down the pipe. More bad news: the pipe is full of tree roots from our front magnolia tree. They start working on clearing the roots.
The plumbing repair crew leader comes to the front door and asks us to take a look at something. (Although we don’t know it yet, this will set a pattern for the next few days. About twice a day, the crew leader will come to us and ask to come see the latest development. It is never good news.) Now that they’ve cleared the roots, they’ve sent a camera up and down the pipe to check it out. It’s in terrible shape. Apparently the concrete pipes are so old (perhaps from 1928, the year the house was built), the concrete is disintegrating. The camera reveals many breaks in the pipe, all possible sites of future problems. Rather than ripping it all out, there’s a way they can insert a new lining in an existing pipe. We elect to go for this option. They begin digging two more big holes.
We have a series of phone calls with various insurance folks. It turns out that sewage backup is typically not covered by most standard homeowner’s policies. By a small miracle, however, the agent who sold us the policy 15 years ago had apparently convinced us to add sewage backup coverage to the policy. Although we won’t know for certain until an adjuster can come out to look, we may in fact be covered for the damage to the house (but not, alas, for the plumbing repair costs).
So far, we’re actually quite lucky. No one’s hurt, and nothing irreplaceable was damaged. We managed to pick up a precious album of baby photos off the carpet just as the water was reaching them – the box the album was in was ruined, but the album was fine. The biggest hassle at this point is the deafening roar of blowers and machines running throughout the night, forcing Liya to move up out of her (unaffected) basement bedroom to our room.
Small disaster, day 2. The repair crew leader asks us again to take a look at something, which of course is more bad news. They’ve found a mysterious break in the pipe further on down towards the sewer main. Getting to the bottom of that necessitates another big hole in the yard (we’re up to four at this point). There are now four trucks in front of our house working on our impromptu construction project. More trouble: as they dig down to the pipe in one of the holes, they strike the pipe and it spontaneously crumbles at that point. It’s clear that it’s in dire need of repair, and it’s surprising we haven’t had more problems with it. Instead of concrete, it’s more like we have pipes made out of compressed sand.
Small disaster, day 3. The flood team starts ripping out the ruined guest room carpet, then cutting out a strip of drywall anywhere it was touched by the water. The plumbing repair crew, meanwhile, has gotten down to the mysterious break in the pipe near the street. It seems that an entire section of pipe has just eroded away. So all the water has just been going into a small (but probably growing) hole under the sidewalk, and from there making its way eventually into the next section of pipe. More trouble = more time = more cost. They do manage to put in the replacement liner on a section of the pipe, but there are two more sections to go, and we’re pretty certain we haven’t heard the end of the bad news yet.
Small disaster, day 4. More digging brings still more trouble. When they widen one of the holes, they come up against a buried cable that significantly complicates their ability to make progress. Then, late in the afternoon, the repair crew leader knocks again on our door, which we’ve learned is always terrible news. By now, he no longer needs to ask us to come “take a look at something”. He knocks, and we go outside to see the new bad thing they have discovered.
This time, the new bad thing is a doozy. One of the sections of pipe they’re trying to re-line crosses under our neighbor’s property. In preparation for lining this section, they looked down the pipe with a camera. To their considerable surprise, they have found another pipe that crosses directly through our pipe. This unexpected pipe appears to be our neighbor’s gas line. When our neighbor built a new home 15 years ago, the city gas company must have used a drill to bore horizontally through the soil straight from the meter to the street. By sheer bad luck, this drill apparently drilled straight through the side of our sewage pipe and out the other side. Both sections of pipe actually work in this condition, but now that we need to line the pipe, the gas line is a huge obstacle.
This entails more phone calls, and a couple more trucks to add to the growing collection on our section of the block. The gas company representative refers to the situation as a “cross-bore”.
It’s wonderfully comforting to hear that they have a name for this problem. That means they’ve dealt with similar situations before, and might actually have some plan for fixing it.
Jan cannot resist turning any unusual situation into a lesson for the girls. During a break in the construction activity, Jan takes the girls outside to show them one of the four deep holes around our house. He shows them the hole furthest from our house, in which there’s currently a break between the sewage line from the house and the pipe that leads to the sewer main. This is simultaneously gross and fascinating — it’s rare for one to have a chance to really, deeply appreciate that stuff that goes down a drain doesn’t just disappear. It has to go somewhere, traveling there via a hidden network of pipes underground.
Given the opportunity, Jan suggests to the girls that they try flushing a toilet somewhere on the second floor, so we can time how long it takes for the water to come out the pipe at the edge of our property. The girls agree that this is a fantastic idea — in fact, none of them wants to be the one to flush a toilet; they all want to stay outside and hold the stopwatch. They make Jan go inside to do it first, and coordinate via a mobile phone. Then Anya agrees to do it so Jan can time another attempt.
Time for water to travel from master bathroom to edge of property: 35 seconds.
Time for water to travel from kids’ bathroom to edge of property: 25 seconds.
Small disaster, day 6. Our little plumbing issue has metastasized into a full-scale re-lining operation of all three straight runs of pipe under the ground on our property. Today the City of Seattle got involved, with their gas line repair crew on site to fix the “cross-bore” problem we discovered on Saturday. The gas workers allow as how this problem comes up more often than you would imagine.
Small disaster, day 9. The end of the tunnel (or is that the end of the pipe?) is now in sight. The repair workers finish re-lining the last of the underground pipes. If all goes well, the city inspector will be out tomorrow, and all the holes can be filled back in.
Small disaster, day 11. The outside phase of our impromptu construction project wraps up today. Workers replace the various bits of sidewalk which had needed to be jackhammered out in order to reach parts of the pipe underground. They helpfully let us know when they’ve finished up, and suggest that our kids might want to make handprints and such in a section of new cement on the south side of the house. This idea is eagerly picked up by all three girls. We happen to be in the middle of hosting a brunch for our friends Martha and Adam, so their two girls Alice and Lucy contribute designs to the walkway as well.
We still have a basement guest room and garage that need new drywall, and the guest room needs new carpeting as well, so we’ve still got a ways to go until we’ve completely recovered. But at least we’re out of the most intrusive phase of the recovery.
Our little Nutmeg turns 16 years old today. Since we already have to swing by the pet food store to stock up on cat food, we also pick up some fresh catnip and other treats with which to spoil her a bit. She’s a pretty happy kitty.
Anya creates a number of informational nature posters on whales, okapis, and other animals, then hangs these on the outside of her bedroom door. “My plan is that people will be so fascinated by the pictures and information that they won’t notice my room is messy.”
Piano recital. The girls’ piano teacher, Ms. Heafield, has arranged with another instructor for a joint student recital. This takes place at the other instructor’s house, which has a very nice conservatory in the back. Jan’s mom is able to join us there as well. All three girls play nicely. (Not shown in the photo: the large purple snow boots Anya decided to wear to the recital.)
We’re planning to have some work done on the trees in our backyard, including a laurel that’s invading from the backyard of our neighbors on the other side of our back fence. In the afternoon, we swing by that neighbor’s house to see if anyone’s home and introduce ourselves. (They rent, so we don’t know them yet.)
Angela knocks on their front door. No answer. She knocks again. No answer. We’re just about to leave, when the door opens with a loud CRACK. Startled, Angela screams, “AAAAAH!”
Thankfully, the neighbor seems more amused than frightened of the strange people who have just knocked on her door and then screamed, and they appear to be okay with us working on the tree.