Slight Detour: Job Well Done, Garrett and Mark

Bill and I got acquainted with two hard-working, fine young men this week.

We were impressed, not only with their teamwork, skills and efficiency but also with their all-around positive and pleasant natures.

Garrett Poelstra, son of Randy and Carla, grew up on a dairy farm just a couple of miles away.

His family has a leadership role in operation and management of the Oden Water System.

Over the years, Garrett has moved into the position as licensed operator for treatment and distribution of the system which serves much of the Selle and Oden rural areas.

Over the past few weeks, he has spent much of his time out and about looking for leaks in both the Oden and Colburn systems.

Meanwhile, his friend Mark Mitchell usually works in the woods for Everhart Logging out of Bonners Ferry.

He runs a processor on logging jobs. It's still early yet for logging season to go into full motion, so Mark has been tagging along with and teaming up with Garrett while waiting to return to the woods.

Yesterday the two came to the Lovestead to repair a problem with our network of automatic waterers.

Regular readers may remember back in March when I penned a post about what I figured was the second worst day in my adult life----the first being our house fire in 1984.

The March debacle occurred on levy election day when schools were closed because of yet another winter storm and when Bill, with his knee roller and crutches, had to be at the Edgewater Resort all day for a meeting.

Well, it wasn't long that morning before we realized that our low water pressure probably meant a leak.

After voting and dropping Bill off at his meeting, I came home to the "Day from Hell," which was topped off a really strange ZAGS men's basketball loss.

My first mission: to find the leak. Shoveling through huge piles of snow and fighting off all kinds of frustrations, I found it gushing at the end of the lane.

A pipe had broken, causing the tank to distribute huge amounts of water----possibly in case we had a forest fire in the snow.

Twas an ugly sight, to say the least. My next challenge was to figure out how to turn off the water leading to the pastures.

Long story short, it took an hour's worth of ice chipping, a whole lot of cuss words and eventually three different helpful men to figure out where the turn-off was located and shut the water off.

That day Garrett turned out to be the knight in shining armor because he brought along a pump to remove water from the box, allowing him to see the turn-off.

Well, yesterday both Garrett and Mark played yet another role as dual knights-in-shining armour as they capped off the pipe leading to the waterer, which we decided to abandon.

They also replaced a bad culvert in the driveway leading to the barn.

In both cases, they left a tidy work site.

Finally, they examined the rest of our waterers, fixing one that was missing a thermostat and making sure all are working properly.

Bill and I are very grateful, as we always are when hard-working folks, who perform their labor and their magic with a sense of both pride and perfection, come our way, solving problems for us and fixing things which would take us forever or not at all.

So, many thanks, Garrett and Mark.

We know we'll appreciate your hours of helping us out for many years to come.