When Home Ownership Is Over Rated

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published October 27, 2025] 2025

When you own a 1947 house that still has most of its original cast iron pipes, there is nothing that puts more fear in your heart than plumbing catastrophes.

Our pipes have been photographed more often than most super models. The technology for this is actually pretty cool. The plumbing catastrophe guys thread a camera 130 feet through our pipes starting from our back cleanout access (and more on that anon) to the street, resulting in a movie, with audio, that they can then Airdrop onto your Smart phone for future viewing pleasure.

I will say that this video would be the perfect way to dispense with dinner guests who might be overstaying their welcome. "Hey,"  you mention to the diner who doesn't seem inclined to depart your table even though everyone else left an hour ago, "wanna see some really cool video of our sewer line?"

Fortunately, this is only the third major plumbing catastrophe we've had in the decades we've lived here. But all three have been epic.

Of course, for years, we had a plumber on speed dial when our older son, Rory, used to have a predilection for flushing toys - rocket parts were a specialty - down the toilet and watching with fascination the ensuring flood. There is nothing more disconcerting than seeing rolls of toilet paper bobbing down the hallway.

Our first major plumbing disaster occurred on January 7, 1981 at 7 a.m. when, through no fault of ours, a mainline sewer block in front of our home caused the entire neighborhoods'  sewage to detour through our home for more than two hours before the city emergency crews could clear it. After Proposition 13 passed in 1978, one of the line items that disappeared from the city's budget was routine maintenance of sewer lines resulting in far too many situations such as ours.

I was home alone with my two-year-old and eight-month-old baby (my then-husband was, of course, off playing tennis) when I heard a loud rumbling followed by the whole house shaking before geysers of sewage exploded from every sink, toilet, shower and drain in the house. They could truly make a horror movie out of this. I have photos taken for insurance purposes but are not printable because, as my then-editor pointed out, they are completely disgusting. Remediation took months, and we won't even go into the Gamma Globulin shots and finding toilet paper in our home in colors we had never used. (Toilet paper used to come in decorator colors to match your decor.)

So that this could never happen again, we paid a lot of money to install cleanouts and overflow valves both in front of the house, and in the crawl space under the house in the back.

Suffice to say that sewer line maintenance came back into the city budget due to significant claims like ours. But this has not all been good news. In fact, I have written several previous columns detailing episodes when both our immediate neighbors along with fellow La Jollans posting on local social media reported that the city's overzealous sewer maintenance crews have blasted raw sewage into their bathrooms. Our neighbors across the street actually had sewage on their bathroom ceiling. Ironically, the city had been attempting to forcefully eradicate another neighbor s subterranean roach problem but maybe got a little overzealous on the velocity. 

It's the people closest to the manhole covers where the crews are working that are most vulnerable to this. Adding to a long list of quirks to our home, aside from the phantom streetlight that neither the city nor SD G&E will acknowledge, and an address that even Uber can t find, is that we have not one but two manhole covers on either side of our property. Unfortunately, there are a lot of electrical conduits in them and if water gets down there, they short out, and sometimes actually even explode. Seriously, there should have been disclosures when we bought this place.

We had fortunately managed to avoid any city sewer maintenance blasts into our home until September of 2024 when our hallway shower was suddenly filled with raw sewage that also managed to rupture the cast iron pipes underneath it. I have written about this before as well, and my now-editor also declined to publish those pictures citing "readers eating breakfast."

I was sort of hoping that God wouldn't consider us candidates for plumbing crises again so soon (we're good people!) But this past summer, I was noticing that azaleas that I thought were long gone (they take a lot of water so we decided to let them crump) were suddenly flourishing. They are not on a sprinkler line and it has hardly rained. Meanwhile, the almost-impossible-to-kill philodendrons which had always flourished in that location, slowly died. And of course, this was all taking place right next to our front porch in the most prominent location possible.

Denial is a wonderful thing. I was enjoying the renaissance of the pretty azaleas until I had a sudden realization at 3 a.m. one morning when one's denial mechanism is at its weakness that the azaleas were flourishing because they had a water source.

Two months, seven different companies, and a meteoric rise in my knowledge of plumbing later, we discovered a broken/cracked 1947 cast iron sewer pipe right near our front porch which is (a) two feet underground (b) under brick (c) crisscrossed by landscaping pipes (d) requiring the removal of dense (but largely dead) landscaping with lots of roots (e) running right under our main incoming water line which (f) had to be expensively mapped and flagged before anything could be remediated.  It couldn't be in a worse location. 

We were cautioned that whoever tried to fix this pipe would have to be really really careful not to sever our main water line which would be a sudden crisis, a massive water bill, and leaving us without water. 

Estimates just to fix this line were up to $12,000, no guarantees about any main water line severing, and didn't include the $2,000 in diagnostics and line mapping we had already spent, nor re-landscaping and re-bricking afterwards. 

Home ownership can be really over-rated.

But we finally decided to go with a non-digging option, called an "epoxy patch liner" that would be threaded through the existing pipe through those clean outs we had installed back in 1981.

The azaleas will be the acid test. Please, please don t grow back.

Epoxy liner patch gets ready to be threaded into sewer line

                Blue flags map the location of our main incoming water line so it isn't severed

September, 2024: City sewer maintenance crews accidentally blasted raw sewage into our shower and broke pipes in the process 

Why It Takes Four Women 80 Emails To Set A Lunch Date

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published October 13, 2025] 2025

I've spent considerable time over the years pondering the mysteries of the universe, but the one I truly can't solve is why it takes four women eighty emails to find a mutually-agreed upon date for lunch.

Of course, that also applies to movie groups, book clubs, bridge dates, and pretty much any activity where more than three women are attempting to congregate.

I know there are digital applications where everyone can post her available dates. But it doesn't matter. By the time everyone does, someone is already not available. How is it that we can be this busy?

A friend belongs to a theoretically-weekly bridge foursome that only ends up meeting about ten times a year. Hoping to improve that, they enacted policy about requiring a replacement to be provided should one not be able to attend. That lasted until four subs showed up to play.

Now, I've never belonged to a bridge club (can't count cards to save my life) but I have belonged to a number of movie groups. One that I belonged to had eight members. Deciding on a movie was complicated enough, so to keep the logistics down, we decided we would always meet on the second Thursday of the month. We saw lots of movies over time but the one date on which we never saw one was the second Thursday of the month. Because as soon as the long-suffering movie group organizer sent out a query as to what we wanted to see, someone invariably responded that she wouldn't be available on that night but would be available on these nights. And then we were off and running. Eighty emails to find a new date would have been optimistic.

The organizer of that group, who valiantly hung in there for years and for whom I have nothing but admiration, is now rumored to be in a home for the organizationally frustrated, sipping umbrella drinks on a bucolic lawn and being tended by white-coated professionals.

Because even when we finally agreed upon a new date (which curiously always seemed to be a Monday even though we'd all decided earlier that we shouldn't meet on Mondays since it was a bad day for everyone), we had to pick a movie. (A corollary of the Eighty Emails To Find a Date Rule seems to be Forty Emails to Agree on Anything Else.) Now, these were women who liked movies (and hence why they joined such a group) and some of them belonged to film societies as well. So we couldn't see any of the film society picks, or anything that was being reserved to see with a husband, or even that anyone had already seen with someone else. One of our members would only see "important"  movies, defined as being well reviewed by the New York Times film critic and thus having socially-redeeming value. I myself am a "fluffy" movie person (think rom-coms) but movie groups are not generally fluffy movie crowds. In fact, we did not see movies; we saw "films."    The end result was that our selections were often three-hour black-and-white graphically-violent war dramas in Hungarian with subtitles depicting (way too successfully, in my view) the misery of the human condition. But no one had already seen it. (I think that statement may apply globally.) I spent many of these with my jacket over my head. However, I totally adored the other women in the group and we always had dinner afterwards, often with enough wine to blot out memories of the movie which usually caused me screaming nightmares for weeks.

I would also mention that the person who threw out the first volley about changing the date usually cancelled at the last minute. And don't even ask how many emails it was to decide where to go to dinner.

But getting back to my topic (and somewhere back there, I think I had one): what is it that we re all doing that scheduling anything is so impossible? For most of my friends, our car pool days are over, but we seem to have filled that time with endless other activities which is going to be a whole separate column. I have to say that one of my favorite excuses for being unavailable for lunch came from a long-time extremely dear friend who had volunteered to make the communion wafers for church, a full day affair. (Well, at least that way you know they didn't from China.) Even her son said, So Mom, is holycommunionwafers.com out of the question? That one gets a pass for pure originality.

But otherwise, I'm kind of hoping that the pendulum can swing the other way on this frantic over-scheduling of our lives. Because this eighty emails thing? We have better things to do with our time. (Don't we?)

 

Dooming Your Own College Application

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published October 6, 2025]  2025

Watching my friends'  grandchildren wrestle with the college application process, I am reminded of my own saga of applying to - and being rejected by - Brown University. It turns out the school requires you to be able to locate the state of Rhode Island.

My older granddaughter, a high school sophomore in Los Angeles, is already pondering colleges, and given that she has spent considerable time in the Northeast with the other grandparents, definitely has Brown on her radar. But she fears that I have sabotaged her chances. I have assured her that they don't keep application records that far back but she is not convinced.

If legacies were a guarantee of admission, I would have been a shoo-in at Brown. My father's family was from Rhode Island and Brown was almost like the local community college. You could go to Brown and still be home for Sunday dinner. It s a small state.

I should mention that Brown (all male) and its associated women's college, Pembroke, merged in 1971 making Brown a co-ed school. My parents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. My grandparents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. All the aunts and uncles had gone to Brown or Pembroke. My brother, a year older, was already at Brown.

My mother's Ohio family, definitely not wealthy, were all educators. My great-grandmother graduated from college. My grandmother had a Ph.D. in zoology. My mother snagged a full scholarship to Pembroke where she met my father in an Honors Shakespeare class at Brown.

Everyone hoped I'd go there too. I frankly had no interest. Fortunately for me, I was a long shot anyway.

I've covered in previous columns my uncontested career as the family idiot. I was the blond sheep in a family of brown-eyed brunette geniuses. My younger son is fortunate to have inherited the lightning-fast mind of my siblings, and fortunately much better social skills.

Speaking with my brother (whom I love dearly) he has observed that if he were in elementary school now, he'd be diagnosed with Aspergers. No argument from me! (Only Aspergers?) I was more recently contemplating how many bottles of Tylenol my mother might have consumed during her pregnancy with him until I realized Tylenol hadn't been invented yet. 

I was always deemed to "not test well."   The illusion was that this poorly-designed IQ test simply failed to capture what was my obvious intellect. Looking back, I think that I was simply not very good at much of what it was testing and that my scores were an accurate reflection of that. In fact, when I was applying to graduate schools, I screened for any requirements for tests that required heavy abstract abilities. The GREs I could study for, but if a test gave me a series of numbers or geometric figures and asked what the next one in the series would be, my only answer was ever beats me!

Because I "didn't test well,"  I was by seventh grade in a track of kids headed for a less competitive state colleges or possibly vocational school. My siblings, of course, were in the top track, already headed for the Ivies.

I did have one superpower, which I have to this day. I am pathologically persistent. You will never outlast me. My grades were always better than my siblings'. I try harder.

I was also fortunate to have a mother who early on recognized my love of writing and encouraged it in every way. I still remember her advice: Write what you know. Write from your heart. Find your own voice. I feel so grateful to her to this day.

She always praised - never critiqued - anything I wrote. She wanted writing to be only joy. But in hopes of subtly encouraging the better stuff ("better"  being very relative), she'd ask if she could buy her favorites for a nickel. (After she died, I found a folder of these early purchases.  She was one optimistic woman.) 

Writing has been a life-long coping mechanism for me. No matter how bad things ever get, I m always thinking, "how will I write about this?"

So by the time I was applying to colleges, including Brown, I was a legitimate candidate in many ways:   top 10% of my class, editor of the school paper and president of the school's service group. Wrote a great essay. But my SATs in the high 500s were most definitely not Ivy League level.

One thing I've learned over the years is how many different types of intelligence there are. My first husband, for example, was born with homing pigeon instincts. He could find a place he'd only been to once twenty-five years ago.

Neither my second husband, Olof, nor I possess this skill. We are both directionally disabled. As my younger son, Henry, used to lament as we ferried him around to soccer games all over the county, "if there's a 50% chance of turning in the right direction, you guys will get it wrong 90% of the time."   Sadly, he was correct.

Back when I was applying to colleges, a personal interview was required for the most competitive colleges. For reasons not clear to me now, my parents allowed me, a 16-year-old, to make the four-hour drive from Pleasantville, New York, to Providence, Rhode Island for my interview at Brown. Afterwards, I would spend the weekend visiting my grandparents in the area.

The only directional support at the time was a road map. Off I went, allowing plenty of time. I listened to the radio and sang along.

After I'd been driving for a while, I kept thinking I ought to be there by now so I pulled into a gas station in Seekonk, Massachusetts and explained to the nice guy at the pump that I was trying to get to Brown University in Providence and I seemed to be lost.

He inquired what direction I had come from. "The I-95 from New York,"  I replied.

"Sweetheart,"  he exclaimed, "you drove all the way through the state of Rhode Island and right through downtown Providence!"

He got me turned around and I did find Providence, and Brown, but I was two hours late for my interview. I regaled the admissions director with my hilarious story about not being able to find Rhode Island.

Brown rejected me. My grandmother, a substantial contributor, never gave them another dime. I was so relieved.

Had I subconsciously sabotaged my interview? Maybe. My directional disabilities probably didn't help. Or then, maybe they did. I ended up at the school I had really wanted to go to. 

Still, my granddaughter is convinced they have records of this somewhere and that her own application will be doomed. That somewhere in their computer even after all these years, it will say, "grandmother couldn't find Rhode Island."

 

 My mother outside her dorm