You know how if a story takes place in someplace that’s been continuously occupied by people for hundreds or thousands of years, there’s a decent chance that one of the characters is going to dig up some forgotten treasure? Yeah, so that happened.

The meadow where Lise used to practice archery and where nothing has ever been built; the meadow where we’re building an ADU we can live in while the house gets rebuilt. The meadow where, since nothing was ever there, the county wanted us to get all kinds of extra inspections and surveys before they’d give us a permit. That meadow. Yeah, the builder and the architect thought that taking the top four feet off the hill would make the geologist happy (it did) and would give a bit more space for construction (it does) — well, it turns out that at three feet down, there was a septic tank.
A septic tank. Buried on the top of a hill. Never permitted. The county knew nothing about it. So now that has to get broken up and removed, since it’s smack in the middle of where we want to put a foundation. At least the hole it leaves will consume some of this extra dirt we’ve got.
