Rolling My Eyes

We moved into this house four years ago come September. The house sits on a lot that is nearly an acre large, and while some of the space is just wild, there is quite a bit of landscaping around most of it. Yard work is neither mine nor J's strong point, and our house will never win any yard of the month awards.

This morning, in an attempt to avoid running, I decided to go investigate the long defunct sprinkler system. There are sprinkler heads in the yard, so obviously there is a system. There was a timer and transformer set up under the house that powered up and showed a display when you plugged it in, but I'd never been able to make it do anything regarding watering the lawn.

Please note: I have been know to miss the obvious from time to time. I did not grow up with a sprinkler system (unlike some folks around here, AHEM), so they are foreign to me.

So since it has been murderously hot and our yard and landscaping is in dire need of water, I thought I'd give it a go this morning and see if I could do anything with it. Funny enough, right outside the crawl space, very near where the timer and transformer plug in, there was a white piece of pipe sticking out off the ground. On close inspection, the end of the pipe had threads - as if you could, oh I dunno, screw a WATER HOSE into it? I seemed to remember j saying that you could run water to that pipe and test the sprinkler system, should either of us ever be so inclined. Well, today I felt so inclined.

I screwed in a hose to the pipe (the hose actually fit - hooray!), turned on the water, and fiddled around for a bit with the timer. Nothing. Hm. I set the thing to manual, and started flipping through "zones" - whatever those are. At one point, I found the setting for zone 1, and heard noises that suggested water was running through the pipes...

So I walked around the back yard, just as Alyssa came outside and said, "Hey! You got the sprinkler running!"

Holy crap. It actually worked.

Over the course of the next hour or so, I found 5 working zones, one of which will water the biggest part of the lawn in the backyard. Holy shit. This sucker would've been working for the last four years if I'd taken a few minutes to investigate. Sometimes I feel like a complete dumbass. Sometimes it is totally justified - like today. Sheesh.