My buddy got a scratch off for $5 one time and won $200. He put it in his glove box and forgot about it. Found it a year later when his transmission blew and it paid for half the rebuild. Grandpas know things.

Ha! I tried the same thing with trash bags. Got the cheap ones and now I'm doing the walk of shame to the dumpster with a bag that's leaking mystery juice on my leg.

Your starter was too wet for 6 months" - man, that's brutal. I had a baker at a local pie shop tell me my starter smelled like "old sweat and regret," which was harsh but fair. I was feeding it with tap water that had way too much chlorine, and my hydration was probably around 130%. When I switched to filtered water and dropped to 80%, the thing finally stopped being a sticky disaster. Sometimes we need a stranger to point out the obvious, even if it stings a little.

That cable wrapped around the cutterhead" - that's the part that gets me. How deep was it actually buried in the silt before you hit it? I've seen sonar miss stuff that's sitting just under the mud line. Makes you wonder how many more of those cables are down there. Your torch and grinder plan sounds rough. Did you have to worry about the cable snapping back while you were cutting? I've heard stories of guys getting hurt bad when tension releases unexpectedly.

Is this one of those new builds where they crammed the conduit in after everything else was already laid out? I've seen that way too often in the valley. They pour the slab, frame the walls, then somebody realizes they need to run electrical. So they just hack channels into the concrete or shove EMT through studs at weird angles. It screams rookie oversight or rushing for permits. Either way, you're going to have fun fishing wire through that mess later, or paying someone triple to do it. Phoenix heat makes that concrete a pain too, so any botched conduit is just asking for expansion issues down the line.