Suburbia

The Trouble With Nature

/ Ally Bean / 6 Comments

Just a little glimpse into what is going on around here.  A woman-vs-animal sort of post.  Presented for your edification and entertainment.   

•  It’s cricket-palooza in our garage this week.   Noisy little buggers.   After our previous two weeks of unseasonably cold & wet weather, we’re back to normal temps; the nights are in the 50s and the days are in the upper 70s.  I think that the crickets are rather charming, but Zen-Den has a different opinion of them.  For some reason they seem to like to jump on him in the morning as he walks through the garage to his SUV.  [*tee-hee*]

He’s started to mutter words like RAID & SWEEP & WEEKEND as he walks to Bullwinkle, so I’m guessing that by Monday morning our garage will be a cricket-free zone.

•  I sat in our screened-in porch this morning to drink my coffee and contemplate the meaning of life wake-up. As I tried to meditate on the profundity of the human experience remember what I had to do today, a squirrel fight broke out in the trees right behind me. Our screened-in porch is at the back of the house and is elevated. Thus, when sitting on the porch you are right in among the middle branches of the trees which are immediately behind the porch.  It’s cool.  It’s unique.  But, man-oh-man, is it noisy when unhappy squirrels start to argue over whose nest is going to be built where.

I really don’t care where these squirrels build their nests, AS LONG AS IT ISN’T INSIDE THE HOUSE.  Been there. Done that. Paid someone to catch/murder some squirrels. Not a pretty experience. Don’t want to repeat it.

•  It’s official.  The deranged woodpecker who delights in pecking on our guest bathroom window frame has ruined it.  The window now leaks dirty, grody water inside the house into the bathtub.  There’s a whole fricking forest for this bird to use for his dinner, but he prefers our house.  Yum, yum.

So next week, we will meet with HANDYMAN CONTESTANT NUMBER ONE to see if he’ll do this sort of repair & how much it’ll cost us for him to do this kind of repair. This is a new-to-me sort of house problem, so I have no idea what to expect.  I mean, are we talking the price of Thanksgiving dinner for 6?  Or the price of a lovely, romantic weekend in the city for 2?  Big difference there.

And on that chatty note, I’m out of here for a long weekend of play.  Some say:  make hay while the sun shines.  But I say:  dance while the sun shines.  It is such a rare commodity around here, that not taking advantage of it seems like a sin to me.  I’ll catch up with you, my gentle readers, next week.  

“You’re Taking This Well”

/ Ally Bean / 5 Comments

Last Thursday during routine furnace maintenance, the technician found a hole in the 2nd chamber from the left of the heat exchanger & a crack in the inducer transition of our 13-year-old gas furnace.

[You’re thrilled, right?  Scintillating first sentence.]

He immediately turned off the gas & electric on the furnace and put a red tag on the front of it.  The red tag said:

THIS UNIT HAS BEEN DISABLED DUE TO THE FOLLOWING UNSAFE CONDITION Hole in heat exchanger

Then he very politely asked me to go with him downstairs into the basement to talk about our furnace.  I knew that this wasn’t going to be good.

[I didn’t just fall off the new homeowner turnip truck, ‘ya know?]

So, down we went.  The technician explained the problems, told me about my two solutions to the problems, and then stood there waiting for me to explode.

But I didn’t get mad at all.  I just started to laugh.  A crazy, silly laugh.  It was a laugh that a woman steeped in a life of irony would produce when told that her plans were once again being thwarted.

“You’re taking this well,” he said.  “Most woman yell at me when I tell them their furnace is dead– and needs costly repairs or to be replaced entirely.”

Instead, I stood there– laughed & smiled– basking in the self-knowledge that just that very morning I’d allowed myself to dream that we might actually get the new wall-to-wall carpeting installed on the second floor of the house by Thanksgiving.  That this year for the holidays our home might look tidy without 13-year-old skunky, dirty, original wall-to-wall carpet uglifying the place. 

[And let me interject here to say that wall-to-wall carpeting is something that I hate to my core, but I accept as a necessary evil of suburbia. Making this situation doubly ironic.]  

Yep, that’s what I was thinking as the technician started to tell me the price of a new furnace.   I didn’t listen very carefully to the rest of what he said.  It didn’t matter to me.  I knew that we’d be buying a new furnace, regardless of the cost, by the end of the day.

And that I could put my carpet samples back in the drawer where I’ve kept them for a couple of years.   Waiting for just the right time to buy wall-to-wall carpeting… which I’m beginning to believe is never.

This Is What Passes For Excitement Around Here

/ Ally Bean / 8 Comments
Botanically, a tomato is a fruit. However, in ...

Image via Wikipedia

[Subtitled:  Somewhat Organized Thoughts Upon The Occasion of A Hopefully Random Act of Very Minor Violence]

Our mailbox is a rectangular, black metal one that sits on top of a white wooden post by the street.  It was tomato-ed. This is a first for us.

In the past our mailbox has been: smashed with a baseball bat;  peanutbutter-ed;  egged;  toilet paper-ed;  and robbed.  [One summer I decided to put a small bracket on the back of the white post and hang a basket of geraniums from it.  Very pretty… for the few days that it was there before someone stole it.]  But we’ve never had a tomato thrown at it.

The attack of this not-so-rotten tomato occurred between 6:30 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. while I drove Z-D to work.  Our mailbox, which is large, shiny and very noticeable when pulling out of our driveway, was just fine when we left home.  But when I got back home, the door to it was hanging open and there was a small dent in the side of it.  This I saw from the driveway as I pulled in.

It wasn’t until I walked down our driveway to see up-close what had happened that I realized that we had been tomato-ed with a large, firm, red tomato that left its seedy drool all over one side of our mailbox– and its gushy guts in the grass around the bottom of the wooden post.

As I didn’t grow up in suburbia I can only guess at the motivations for tomato-ing someone’s mailbox.  Questions plague me.

  • Which came first: the tomato or the mailbox?
  • Was this planned?  And if so, where did the perp get his or her tomato?  Stolen from someone’s garden?  Purloined from Mom’s frig?  Purchased at Kroger?
  • Is it possible that our mailbox wasn’t the intended target? 

Considering there are high school kids in the two house across the street from us & in one house next door to us, I have to wonder if this is a case of mistaken tomato-ing.

Answers to these questions elude me, leaving me to suspect that the real reason our mailbox was tomato-ed has nothing to do with logic.  I imagine, that like many things in life, the real reason that our mailbox was tomato-ed is that it was in the right place at the wrong time.

A Garden Wall Worthy Of Fred & Wilma

/ Ally Bean / 2 Comments

[Sub-titled: So You’re Really Going To Do This, Huh?]

Last week while the stock market was on the roller coaster ride of our lifetimes, we decided to do something a little bit different with our money.  Why not invest in something stable, said we.  How about finally getting the back of our property to look like something resembling a backyard, said we.  So…

We had this concrete wall built.  It’s very Flintstone-esque, don’t you think?

###

###

###

###

What I Learned About Having A Garden Wall Built

√  Unlike the land excavating guy who said that he’d be at our house at 8:00 a.m. on Monday and arrived at 3:15 p.m. on Wednesday, when the concrete guy said that he and his crew would there at 5:30 a.m. on Thursday, they were.  With lots of battery-powered lights.  Trying to work quietly, not succeeding.

√  It took 5 hours to create the 2.5′ x 4′ footers.  Two of those hours involved the crew sitting around on the ground, listening to music, laughing among themselves, eating snacks– waiting for the footers to become solid enough to continue on with the wall.  We paid for them to do this, of course.

√  It took about 3 hours for 9 men to build this 30′ x 4′ free-form concrete wall.  A truck in front of the house pumped a foamy kind of concrete through a 90′ hose to the backyard. Two men positioned the concrete, which looked like toothpaste being squeezed out of a tube, along the wall line by slowly walking back and forth; they stopped when the concrete was 4′ high. Then the rest of the men, each holding a trowel in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, shaped the wall.  It was the darndest thing to watch.

√  After the wall was stable and had air-dried for about an hour, a man stained it to look like naturally formed rock.  He used two different colors of paint in sprayers, a water sprayer, and a paint brush dipped in stain.  It took him maybe 45 minutes to do this.  He told me that he wanted the wall to look like “God had put it there.”

√  It takes about a week for this concrete to cure.  So until that happens, the land excavator guy can’t fill behind our wall with dirt to create our yard.  Meaning… there will be more to this story.

###

[Please note: This is Phase Two of a three-part project.  Phase One is here.  Phase Three is here.]