Tag: Suburbia

Talking Dirt

We live on a wooded ravine lot that slopes down to a creek.  And we have a swale on our property.

While sitting on our deck or in our screened-in porch we look directly into the woods behind us.  It is beautiful to see the trees year round.  It is less beautiful to look down into the ravine below and see the soil erosion that is causing our backyard to disappear.

So today I meet with a land planner to discuss his idea about what we’re going to do about our back yard… that is gradually slipping away into the creek… leaving the pillars that support our deck perilously close to the edge of the swale… that allows rainwater to naturally flow into the creek.

This is going to be an expensive mess to fix.  I just know it.

This & That

{april – monday – morning}

√ It’s Get To Know Your Neighbor’s Trash Day in our suburb this morning.

Monday is trash day here and most neighbors put their trash by the curb on Sunday night.  Last night we had high winds that blew everyone’s trash around the yards and into the street.  So far no one has been a slug about picking up the mess in front of their property.  Yeah!

However, every once in a while we have someone who moves here and refuses to pick up any trash but their own.  We don’t like those sort of people.  They don’t last long here in Mom Trails.  [That’s my nickname for this subdivision.]

√ Word of the day is slabjacking. I love saying it.  *slabjacking*

It means that our front sidewalk will be “magically” lifted from underneath to make the sidewalk level again and connect with the bottom of the front stoop.  This requires specialized equipment and the expertise of a concrete company.  *slabjacking*

Currently the front sidewalk is uneven and sinking to the right which is dangerous and ugly.  When the company finishes this repair, we will have a level sidewalk and everything will look almost like new.  *slabjacking*

√ I’m allergic to April.

My allergist refers to my particular allergies as “rose fever.”  I’d be a darned bit less snarly about these allergies if there were some roses on the bushes now.  But the bushes around here are all thorny and dormant with no flowers on them.

I asked my allergist about this obvious discrepancy between reality [no roses in sight] and his term for my malady [clearly based on the concept of roses causing something].  He just laughed, said it was an old-fashioned term, and kept on telling me what to do to relieve my itchy, bitchy, twitchy-ness.  Nothing like modern medicine, eh?