So, I try to keep this blog focused on progress and avoid unpleasant subjects. It’s not that I don’t have plenty of tea to spill, but this isn’t the place to do it. But I beg your indulgence while I make a brief deviation from this policy.

The back yard had a storm drain that connected directly with the sewer system under the street. The ADU Environmental Plan required that the old drain go away, and the drainage from the new unit’s rain gutters be flowed over the driveway and into the street. The contractor who implemented that thought it was ridiculous, and ran the drain directly to the street (although to the gutter, not into the sewer), supposedly with the approval of a city inspector. However, the city rejected this at final inspection.

Instead, we needed to go with the pop-up drain to go over the driveway as per the original Environmental Plan. This was implemented. However, the new placement was rejected by the city as being too close to the sidewalk – the rule now being that the drainage mustn’t flow down the driveway into the street.

The pop-up got moved further back so it will flow into the garden. That was also rejected, because it needed a 3-foot concrete boundary around the drain pop-up so dirt wouldn’t get into it. Three feet? That’s 27 square feet of concrete!

We’ve been working on getting the garden prepared for that boundary, if it is indeed what needs to happen. I had to move a sprinkler, which I had just moved to the present location back in April. Annoying.

The driveway contractor pointed out to us that the geometry of the situation is such that the pop-up is physically higher than much of the drain system. In general, it seems to us that the water’s not really going to want to run uphill. We’ve reached out to the city for clarification.

Meanwhile, the driveway gate’s been moved, and the driveway work is progressing nicely. Here’s pictures of all of that.

One site I help manage uses WordPress and an image gallery plugin by Huge-It. Following a recent WordPress update, the gallery’s admin side has stopped allowing the admin to add images to a gallery. There’s a button, you click it, and nothing happens.

There is no obvious issue, until you look at the Javascript console and see the following error message: this._addClass is not a function. A quick web search confirms that this is likely either a conflict in Javascript libraries included by various plugins, or a jQuery version conflict.

The quick and dirty solution is to edit wp-content/plugins/gallery-and-caption/includes/admin/class-photo-gallery-wp-admin-functions.php and add the following lines:

function custom_admin_js() {
echo '"<script type="text/javascript" src="https://code.jquery.com/ui/1.12.1/jquery-ui.js"></script>"';
}
add_action('admin_footer', 'custom_admin_js');

This basically forces the plugin to use a compatible version of jQuery so it’ll work again.

Hooray! The forces of entropy are held in check for another brief moment.

Old driveway demo is done. Some drainage pies fell victim to the concrete saws, so those got redone. Now the great leveling has begun.

The slope at each point is designed to keep water away from foundations, and direct runoff into the garden where possible. There will be permeable sections as well.

It’s been a while since there was an ADU update. Here’s one. The final inspection passed, but there was some tsuris about the gutter drain and how it gets ducted into the street. The City mandated that it went via a popup over the driveway rather than directly into the street. Why they want that rather than into the sewers, I’m not sure. They specifically rule pout flowing it into the garden, which is what I’d have done if given my druthers.

Anyway, so that got fixed. Meanwhile, the driveway demolition has been proceeding. The new, permeable driveway will be put in soon.

Hm. Looks like the server upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS changed some character encoding defaults somewhere. I’ll have to track down if it’s in the database (most likely), the database connection (possible), PHP, or somewhere else.

In the mean time, please forgive the occasional bad unicode character.