Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters!

The workers on the new house going up across the way finished blocking up the outside walls last Friday, the same day a load of prefabricated wood a-frame roof trusses arrived. Exactly the right number and exactly the right sizes to mock up the garage, the main body of the house and the gable on the opposite side from the garage. They're obviously working from a standardized, factory approved plan.

Yesterday morning the crew, or perhaps a new one made up of carpenters instead of masons, showed up to begin installation and this morning they were done which was a good thing because the rain came down in sheets around noon. They all left for the day.

It's supposed to rain again tomorrow so they probably won't be back to cover the framing with an actual roof until probably Friday when everything should have dried out.

But, at least, it is starting to look a bit like a house.

Suburban Zooarcheology

I came home yesterday evening to find my brother had lopped off more than a dozen fronds from the pineapple palm out front. It is now possible for a full-size adult human to walk around the tree without ducking. (He did a similar chop job with the orange tree by the driveway last week that went even further. I'm not sure whether he got carried away with the pruning or he was cutting it down and just stopped part way through. See: Redneck Studies: The 70% Complete Solution.)

There's a good view of those nasty spikes

I discovered two things as I gathered up the fronds and placed them by the side of the road for trash pick up.*

First: Pineapple palm fronds have long, thin, spiky and incredibly sharp stiletto-like leaves at their base which are quite capable of stabbing one in the hand, thigh, calf or anywhere else that gets too close and they will draw blood.

Second (and less painful but much more interesting): A 'possum up and died under the pineapple palm. I found parts of its disarticulated skeleton pressed into the ground. I have the skull, both halves of the mandible, both femurs, and several vertabrae (probably lumbar, but I can't be sure without others to compare them with). No ribs, no tail bones, no other leg or foot bones although I may just have missed them since they would be very small and it was getting dark.

The bones I do have are in perfect condition. No breakage, no scratches, no teeth missing. And clean. The animal must have died a while ago because there was no soft matter anywhere. (There was the very faintest odor which was sufficient to intrigue Paribanour when I went inside and presented my hands to her but it was faint enough that the other cats were totally uninterested.) skullsunlimited.com is asking $50 for just a skull (of course) and mine is every bit as good and I have the other bits, too.

These are from washington.edu and not mine, but mine look just like this

They're all laid out right now on a fertilizer bag by the front door until I can find a proper way to display them. Some sort of shadow box or something. In the meantime, I'll go back out under the tree and see if I can find any more pieces.

UPDATE: I went back out last evening while it was still light and found the pelvis, more long bones (not sure which), some more vertabrae including tail bones, and several ribs. Still haven't seen any of the very small foot bones.

* We get three trucks coming through on trash day. One automated truck for recyclables in their designated container, another automated truck for non-recyclables in their separate container, and one truck with humans attached picking up "yard waste," basically anything plantish larger than lawn clippings that used to be growing on the property.

Watching the Concrete Set

The new house being built just down the road seems to be going up in fits and starts. Each separate step seems to take half a day at most, followed by days of prepping(?), planning(?), scheduling(?) the next step.

The first load of concrete was used to make the outline of the foundation for the entire house, including garage. The first load of cinder blocks, several days later was placed to encase the line of concrete. A few days after that, the small bulldozer came back and refilled and leveled the space enclosed by the wall so the actual poured foundation would be only a few inches think instead of the foot or so height of the wall.

In the only case of two things happening at the same time I've seen so far, while the bulldozer was bulldozing, a crew with entrenching tools dug up the road median and the verge on our side (down by Neighbor Dan) which is where the the city water mains run. They didn't dig up the street itself so I suppose they bored under the pavement in order to run their pipes. I didn't see it happen but everything's filled in again so there must be a connection set up.

Last week more cement mixer trucks came by and poured the foundation for the house and garage and also put in the driveway. That took a little more than two hours, including the smoothing and leveling. The entire work crew spent the rest of the day sitting around watching the concrete set. I suppose wet cement presents an attractive nuisance and we certainly have kids in the area who would take advantage of the opportunity to put footprints, hand prints, initials and other graffiti wherever they thought they could get away with it, but surely one guard would have been sufficient, no?

Yesterday, several skids of cinder blocks were dropped off and, already today, the outer wall of the house is up over six feet high.

They may not work often, but when they do, they work fast.

Jump Starting the Cats

We turned on the air conditioning for the second time last evening. Just for the night. It was muggy and sticky and my brother wanted to get a good night's sleep as he had to get up early this morning. So we went around closing all the windows and the front door and cranked up the air, mostly to remove the humidity.

Prior to this, the cats had been flaking out in various locations. Mittens was in my room lying on a bookshelf by an open window. Jasmine was splayed out in the foyer not even pretending to look for lizards and had to be shoveled inside so we could close the door. Paribanour was installed in her usual spot atop the TV. Not one of them had so much as twitched for more than an hour.

The dehumidification was palpable almost immediately. I put down their evening kibble.

Within minutes they were chasing each other around the house, banging into furniture, bouncing off the walls and skittering around their humans. Up the end and across the top of the couch, onto my chair and over me, through the kitchen into the dining room, down the hall crashing into the closet door and then racing full-speed back through the living room into my brother's room and another crash. Repeat with variations.

After about twenty minutes of frenetic mayhem, they all collapsed in the living room.

The air conditioning is off again, for now.

Questions On Being Street Viewed

On my way to the library yesterday, I turned right in front of the Googlemobile waiting at the intersection. Boom! There they were, just past the police radar trap. Since that was the street I was turning onto, I looked them straight in the camera lens. It was a beautiful, warm day and I had my windows down and everything.

The current Street View for that intersection is four years old. I will now check that spot on Google Maps every day for the answers to two questions. How long does it take Google to put up new views once the pictures have been taken? Assuming the camera is running constantly and their car was stopped for a minute or two due to cross traffic, will they select me (and others) out of the scene in favor of shots without traffic if possible? And, if they do use a shot with me in it, how will I look making my turn all pixelated?

O.K. Three. Three questions.

And did they catch the radar trap on camera?

Four.

Paris 1951: Three Photographs

I've taken a closer look at the three photos that came in the envelope with the postcards and business cards.

All of the photos are black and white, printed on the standard glossy-front matte-back commercial photo development stock with scalloped edges, lighter but similar to the postcards.

One is of the Eiffel Tower taken from the Trocadero, the standard tourist shot except there are no people on the plaza and only three way off in the distance.

The other two, which I originally believed to be aerial shots, were, in fact, taken from the very summit of the tower itself. One is centered on the Arc de Triomphe, and the other is centered on Le Grand Palais with Sacre Coeur on the horizon. The back of the last one has "Eglise Sacre Coeur" handwritten in pen. The back of the Arc de Triomphe shot simply says "arch" in the same hand, and the one of the tower is blank.

I presume there was a whole roll (at least) taken in and around the city but these are the only ones in the envelope and there are no negatives to be found.

None of these additional landmarks are included in the postcard "tour" although La Madeleine is distinctly visible beyond Le Grand Palais and both Place Vendome and La Bourse (positively) and L'Arc du Carroussel (possibly) are within the span of the image if not discernible.

Hmmm. I just noticed that this last photo also encompasses the neighborhoods from the two business cards which, from this perspective, would be just below Montmartre and Sacre Coeur.

So, is it simple tourism that ties these all together? The handwriting on the photos and the business cards is different. I don't know who "Georges" is nor "M. Presse" (both from the business cards). And who was staying at the now defunct Hotel Metropole?

The Spring Rush

So, last week a small bulldozer came and scraped half of the empty field across from us.

A couple days later some strange fencing went up. Actually, it was less like fencing and more like random fence gates separated by invisible fencing. I think it marks off the area in which the builders will be working but does not inhibit access in any way.

Yesterday, a cement mixer drove by and several construction guys showed up. At first I thought they were going to lay down the foundation slab even though the ground, despite being scraped, had not been leveled. When I came home, however, I discovered they had put in a short (one foot or so) retaining wall outlining the intended floor plan. Presumably, a slab will come later.

Today there's a crew out there with cinder blocks.

Our county assesses impact fees to cover the cost of new infrastructure caused by increased development. When the recession hit, they slashed the impact fees down to near-nothing to try easing the burden on a crashing building industry. Last month, now the economy's back on track, the county commissioners voted to restore about half the fees. There are fewer than 60 days left before the new fees go into effect so there is a scramble to get permits issued before then.

It would seem our builder across the way got his approvals.