The Big Dig

I don't really know what the Big Dig is but I think it is something that went horribly wrong in Boston.

Well, in our family the Big Dig that went horribly wrong was our trampoline hole that I had dug last Spring. It has been a year, but the wound is still fresh. The pain still so very real.

Last Spring I got sick of looking out the window at this white trash trampoline hanging out in our smallish back yard. It took up all the room and it just looked junky. Cam kept wanting to get a cage for it and I hate tramp cages, and besides my friend's cage fell apart in one afternoon. So. . . we got the grand idea to have a hole dug so that we could put the trampoline down into the ground. It is safer there for the kids and it would look so much better.

So, Cam was kind of serious but I was very serious and so I called a guy to come and dig the hole. The first guy I called said it would be $1,000 and I laughed and hung up on him. The second guy said it would be $300 and so I hired him. (Not even questioning why one guy would do it for $700 less. It was a good deal, right?) He did tell me that I'd have to be in charge of getting rid of the dirt. How hard could that be? A couple of wheel barrows and we're set.

So, he shows up one afternoon and digs the hole with a tractor machine thing. I am inside baking bread and living my life, and Cam is at work. And when I look out the window I start getting kind of sick. He has put all the dirt BEHIND the hole and I'm not really sure how we're going to get a wheelbarrow back there, and now that I see it I realize that I'd need about 2 million wheelbarrows--where did all of that dirt come from?--and I need a bobcat to get back there to take all the dirt away. But we can't get a bobcat back there? I'm so sick, so I go visiting teaching because I can't really deal with this and when I come back the guy says it will be $350 and leaves. I overpaid this idiot to put all my dirt where I can't get to it?

Cam came home and he wanted to kill me. He didn't say anything but I knew it. He looked at it and got really quiet. We went on a date that night and I talked to my mom and he talked to my dad and we watched a movie and we never held hands. The cold war had returned. The next morning my mom and sister showed up with shovels to help us tackle the mountain of rocks and dirt, but every time you stuck in a shovel, it hit pure 50 pound rocks and we got about 2 hours into it, and one wheelbarrow and realized it was physically impossible to do this ourselves. So, I went back in and found someone to come and bobcat all of it out of here. That would only cost me about $600. Now I understood why the first guy was so cheap. So, the bobcat came and he drove over the beautiful curbing and destroyed it. He ran into the swing-set and bent it. He ground up the grass and smashed the cement pad to smithereens but he got most of the dirt out of there. After he left, we only had about 5 inches of mud still to be removed. The grass was dead. My irises were destroyed.

My marriage survived. Cam forgave me for hiring an imbecile.

Well, the hole is the gift that keeps on giving. After one year without reinforcements, the hole has started to cave in. The kids have slid down underneath the tramp and created a landslide to take them to their pretend Ember. But, again, as always, Cam has come to the rescue and figured it out.
How does he always do that? He can fix broken pipes and toilets and put in sprinklers and drywall. And now here he is fixing the Big Dig. I love you, my rock-throwing, woodbending, dirt moving man. You rock! (And I mean that in a good way.)