A day of ups and downs

When you live in the country and your water is supplied by a deep well, one of the worst feelings you'll ever get is the one when you turn on a faucet and nothing comes out.  We've been married for forty-six years (in June), and except for one year of that time, have used well water.  

One time we even had to have a new well drilled because the casing of the old one had rusted through and we were getting sand with our water.  

Yesterday the water stopped flowing to our house, and of course to Cliff's sister's house also.  We only know of one person locally who works on well pumps; he lives right up the highway.  I called and left a message.  

An hour or so went by.  Cliff had mentioned that we might call Rick to at least check all the wiring and help us determine whether the problem was with the pump, or something else.  Rick is a heating and cooling man, but he did come and check everything.  Because it's so damp down in the underground well-house, the fuse-box and another electrical box of some sort are very rusty.  Rick cleaned rust off the fusebox, had Cliff turn the power back on, and lo and behold, the pump started working.  

Cliff, Rena, and I did everything but dance, we were so elated.  

Two hours later, the water once again stopped flowing through our faucets.  

Rick told us, when he was here, that the local well-and-pump man has been going through a lot of health problems, to the extent that he even visited Mayo Clinic recently.  That explained why we didn't get a return call from him earlier.  

We're on our own.  

We took containers to our daughter's house and filled them with water so we can at least have coffee.  Cliff brought five-gallon buckets of water from a stock tank to use for flushing. 

I called Feldman's to see if they have deep-well pumps; they do, and they are open on Sundays.  

Rena's son came to help with the pulling of the pump today.  Pulling the pump is one of our most dreaded tasks, but we've done it before.  We pull the pump, Cliff will find out what kind it is, we run to Blue Springs and buy a new one, and we put it in place.  The "we" in these sentences mostly means "Cliff", but I will have my job to do. 
We've done all this before, so we know what is involved. 
We also know there are many "little things" that can go wrong.

It's a little blurry because the wind is still blowing

In other news, there were tornadoes to the west and north of us last night.  All we're getting is some very brisk wind; when I heard the wind whistling outside around the corners of the house, I remembered how my tallest iris was knocked down last year by wind.  So I put an electric fence post beside it and secured the flower stalks to that, using a ripped-up Walmart bag for tying.  The flowers on that Iris have survived the night.