Content warning: The following blog post is mostly about poop and pooping. If you don’t poop, you may find this blog post distressing and confusing. If you do poop but still find this blog post distressing, you can’t say you weren’t warned. But my sympathy is negligible, seeing as how I used most of it on the non-pooping extradimensional aliens who read my blog.

Anyway, I will put the rest of this behind a read-more safety wall:

The other day Wump and Toop came running in from outside, yelling “mum, dad, you’ve got to see this.”

What “this” was, turns out, was a 1.5-metre-deep, 2-metre-across sinkhole where our septic tank access cap used to be.

It’s gotten bigger since then, too. *proud*

It all started, as far as we’ve been able to piece together, with the dudes who came by to drain our septic tank. They do this every few months, coming around with a poop truck and attaching a hose to it and taking away the nightsoil of the Hatboy Ladies and assorted guests. After the last time they did this, there was a bit of a hole left in the ground near the access hatch. I suspect that, either by freak accident or misstep, the tank got broken in the process of emptying it. Perhaps the waterlogged soil on top of the ancient and suddenly near-vacuum-filled tank just made it cave in, who knows?

So then another day later, the hole stopped being a hole and became a gaping crumbling pit that swallowed a wide patch of the admittedly overgrown garden. Which leaves us with the rather pressing question of what we’re going to flush our toilets into, and what we should do long-term.

I consider myself an interested bystander in this of course, insofar as it’s probably going to be my wallet taking the undignified beating over the situation. I have not pooped into the toilets, and from there into the septic tank, since 2011. Except for my occasional intestine-drainings leading up to colonoscopy, and occasional severe multi-bag bouts of the runs (functionally identical to the intestine-drainings, but without the fun of a colonoscopy at the end, and usually accompanied by vomiting). But I digress.

We’re left with several options, all of them as expensive as you would expect “getting poo taken away from your house” to be:

1. We can remove the wreckage and connect the house’s sewage pipe to the municipal pipeline. This will be hellaciously expensive and incur monthly water fees in perpetuity thereafter. It will also require a ton of paperwork and might take six months (during which time the Hatboy Ladies will be pooping on boat / caravan toilets).
2. We can remove the wreckage and seal off the sewage pipe, remove our toilets, renovate our bathrooms to some sort of electrical eco-composting toilet system, and go completely green. Also hellaciously expensive and a lot of disruptive (and probably time-consuming) renovation work.
3. We can remove the wreckage and install a new septic tank. Uncomfortably expensive but nothing we can’t handle. May also be a bit quicker than the other options. It’s a similar mid- to long-term stopgap to the water pump solution I may have complained about elsewhere. But it should work.
4. We can decommission our sewage system entirely and give everybody (residents and guests) colostomy bags. This is not what I would consider a realistic alternative.

So we’re basically left with option #3 above as the only one that seems workable in our current economic situation. Still not great, but I guess things fall apart in a house from time to time and you have to get them fixed.

Oh well.