Day two. The pump guy finally showed up around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, took one look at the milky water in the koi pond and pronounced this conclusion: it ain’t the pump that’s your problem, it’s your well.” I called the well digger (again) and now, this morning, I’m waiting on that serviceman.

The RLA and I linked together four or five garden hoses and semi-flushed the pond with water from our neighbor’s well. And yes, they gave us permission. We weren’t sneaking around the neighborhood at dusk looking for unattended pumps.

The problem is finding well water. Even here on the wrong side of Dixie Highway, most folks have city water and a lot of people even use that for their sprinkler systems. City water is not usable for fish, since fish don’t like the flouride, the chlorine, the benzene and assorted other -ides and -ines that modern tap water provides.

Fortunately, my boss understands the demands placed on a two-career family when the children are sick, and so here I am, waiting for the man while the RLA goes off to mold young minds. Today, he says, he is going to teach them the difference between looking and seeing. I always say that that was the single most important lesson I learned in college. Well, that and how to roll a decent joint with only one paper, and not one of those sissy, double sized papers, either.

Last night, after we gave the fish some fresh well water, we trotted off to Books and Books (the finest independent book store in the south, as far as I’m concerned) to hear Christopher Moore speak. In a moment of lame-ass fandom, I gave him the scarf off my neck. I’d just knitted it, too, with some really yummy hand-spun from the Yarn Wench. It was a natural grey wool, with some odds and ends of color and sparkly stuff, but mostly manly. OK, maybe a leeetle metrosexual. But Moore had a runny nose, which he’d had since Denver, and was on the road for New York and Toronto and I felt bad for him. And I’m a total fan geek, all right?

I managed to take way more time than was polite, got my copy of A Dirty Job signed and made an impression by telling him that I think he’s the modern Thorne Smith. That got a huge smile from him and the book store owner, and Moore said that yes, he thinks that he’s channeling Thorne Smith.

For those readers who have no familiarity with either Christopher Moore or Thorne Smith, Smith wrote the original Topper books (among others) and Moore is the author of such great modern novels as The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, The Island of the Sequined Love Nun, and Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Jesus’ Childhood Friend. Most of these (with the exception of Lamb) deal with regular folks, whose lives get turned inside out when the old gods, or minor gods, decide to take an active interest in them. Wonderful stuff.