The Great Leap Forward

Boy, howdy, was I sure wrong about that!

Our sidewalk construction took a quantum leap forward this week. The warning sawhorses suddenly appeared all the way down the road past us just before the weekend, although I still couldn't see any other signs of actual work on the horizon. Someone did stack a load of paving tiles by a driveway made of paving tiles (again, also past our street) in preparation for altering that home's access approach. But that was it.

Today, I woke up to find the verge along our property already scraped. The scraping does not yet cross the street onto Neighbor Dan's property and should not be confused with either the leveling necessary or the trench that will hold the concrete forms. This is just a ripping of the sod in anticipation of leveling and trenching and is necessary because the crab grass and Mexican clover, among other things, form long, tough tendrils that snake across the ground. That's a strip we'll never have to mow again, although we'll have to see how much green they leave on the street side of the sidewalk. And it looks as if they're going to be able to work around the pineapple palm at the corner of our property. (For some strange reason, there is a pineapple palm almost exactly at each of the corners of our territory and, yet, no one has ever admitted to planting any of them.)

At least some of the machinery has moved in, as well. I'm not sure what they used for a scraper since it was all done before 8 a.m. and I neither saw nor heard them while they were at it. There's a backhoe just up the road, now, but that may be the trencher and, in any event, has not been used since I've been watching. There are also a couple of pieces of heavy equipment parked in the open field across the road. I can see personal trucks used by the workers to get to and from the job site parked in the median way back up the road but no people are in evidence anywhere.

It's amazing how much can get done with nobody around.