Flag(pole) of Our Father

My brother recently bought a flag pole to replace the one our Dad installed when he and Mom bought the house.

What Dad installed could be called a flag pole only in the technical sense that it was indeed a pole and it often had a flag attached to it. It was a plain metal tube sticking ten feet out of the ground with holes drilled into it through which lines could be run and tied to the flag's grommets. The one my brother bought is anodized metal, extensible to about 25 feet, with a goldish finial on top and two preset snap hooks for attaching the flag.

Of course the snap hooks turned out to be one inch too far apart to mount the nice new flag my brother bought to replace the worn one that started this whole project so he'll use the cheap, lightweight, printed flag that came with the pole (and fits) until it fades and then drill a new hole for the lower snap hook.

Yesterday, despite 95F temperatures, 95% humidity and almost 100% cloud cover and thunder rumbling on the horizon, we went out to install the new pole.

Dad was a firm believer in over-engineering projects. In his opinion, the pyramids were done a bit slapdash. And so, of course, the old pole turned out not to be ten feet long but rather fifteen with five buried firmly in the ground. We finally wrestled it out with much cursing and sweating and dug a new hole about a meter further back from the street to avoid the overhead power lines to which the new pole, when fully extended, can come dangerously close. Our hole was not nearly so deep mostly because we used concrete to secure the base and not just earth.

I refilled the old hole with rubble from the new and made sure the shovel, carpenter's level, etc., were all put away so this doesn't qualify as a redneck 70% project. We'll refrain from hoisting the new flag for a few days until we're sure the concrete as set fully.

It never did rain although there were a few bolts of lightning later in the evening.

Redneck Studies: The 70% Complete Solution

I've mentioned before my theory that the reason redneck properties end up looking like redneck properties is the subjects' congenital inability to complete any project. I hold to that premise.

Just a few recent items of note in passing:

My brother has a power wash machine that's been sitting in the garage for a couple years now. (I think the last time it was used was when Mom died and he blasted (most of) the outside of the house before the cousins came over for her wake.) A couple months ago he took it out and discovered just how easy it was to clean the driveway of twenty-odd years of weather, dirt and grime. He would do a smallish section at a time a couple times a week and we moved the vehicles around accordingly to accommodate.

Except he's apparently become bored with that now. The last 20-25% of the driveway, down by the street, hasn't been touched in weeks and there is no indication he intends to go any further. And it's not an even break between completed/untouched sections where he can pretend that it's a different color concrete or anything. It's just obviously not done.

The Christmas tree, at least, came down a week after I removed the last of the ornaments. He insists there is one proper way to assemble and disassemble the tree and he knows what that is. So it's in its box . . . which is still sitting in the hallway two weeks later. I do not know the location of his storage unit, neither do I have a key.

Meanwhile, though, he suddenly had the urge last evening to clean out the roll-top desk. It needed it desperately, having accumulated probably a decade's worth of holiday cards, utility bills, batteries (dead and alive), pens (dead and alive), address books (mostly alive), insurance calendars (assuredly dead), and other assorted ephemera and impedimenta. He had apparently finished by the time I came home since he was in his room watching TV having left the chair he was using blocking the doorway and all the drawers and top of the desk wide open. Do you want cats in your roll-top desk? Because that's how you get cats in your roll-top desk. They'd climb on it occasionally even when it was shut. I closed everything up.

I believe he honestly does not see finishing detail. And certainly does not see it as part of the project. The project was to take down the tree. It's down. The project was to clean out the desk. It's clean. End of story.

I don't know what the deal is with the driveway.

Planning Ahead

Well, at least I now know what (some) of the lumber is for.

My brother treated himself to a firepit. He intends to build what he calls a patio by the front door, set up the firepit there, sit back and drink beer and use the wood for fuel. He doesn't want to put it out back because of some obnoxious nearby dogs who are happy to bark at anything they see (or think they see) all night long. He's much happier with it being visible from the road which, in all honesty, is a better view, anyway.

No idea when the construction on this "patio" might begin. No idea, either, on his intentions for the plywood. Or the crutches.

The funny thing is, we already have a couple of woodpiles on the property that have been aging for literally years. Of course, by the time he's ready to start burning, the new sticks could also be well-seasoned despite being pine.

In the meantime, city code enforcement stopped by and left a note on our door. Apparently, the carrotwood tree is visible from the road and so was all the new lumber which is a violation of the city's "No Outdoor Storage" rule. My brother moved a small section of fencing to hide the 4x6 stumpy bits and carefully rearranged the pallets to lie flat behind a decorative wall of railroad ties (still around the carrotwood) and: voila! No more code violation. (At least, nothing that can be seen from the street.)

On the plus side, he did just bring home a large bag of blood oranges from somewhere, so there's that.

But, Then Again, It's Not the Last Minute, Yet

Well, Hurricane Season has officially started as of the beginning of the month and, although the daily rain cycle of last week has broken and the skies are clear again, already the local weather reports have added a special warning-imminent crisis segment just for hurricanes, of which there are none around and only one potential one way over the horizon on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

But, y'know, that named tropical storm could cross over Mexico losing most of its energy on the way and depositing the remnants into the Gulf where they might survive as some sort of disturbance that has a theoretical chance of affecting us. Someday. Maybe. It could happen.

It's never too early to start panicking.

On the other hand, it's been almost a decade since our last real hurricane and an awful lot of people have moved in since then and don't know--or just plain forgot--what a true cyclonic storm can be like. I know we've let our own food stocks slip a bit, and we haven't tested any of our batteries, lights, etc., recently.

My brother got a quote on replacing our roof but that's not something he intends to do immediately so, if we do get hit, we will be under a 25 year old roof.

And somebody official (not sure who) just released a new flood map of the county that puts us under threat for 3 feet of water from storm surge although it's not clear what size storm they're referencing, or its likelihood, or where exactly they measured the three feet from. If it's from the main road we could still be mostly O.K. since the house is built on a small rise (coincidentally, about three feet) above street level.

And now, of course, if we do have to evacuate, we'll need something to carry the cats in.

So maybe a little panic-mongering from the local weather folk is what we need to start prepping after all.

This Is How the Kids Learn Bad Habits

My brother spent yesterday afternoon repairing the screens on three different windows after two of the cats busted out of the joint over the weekend.

We're at that golden time of the year when it's warm enough not to need to keep heat in the house and cool enough not to need the air conditioning and so virtually every window is open 24/7. The cats like to sit on the sills and fiddle with the screens (or, sometimes, claw at them if they see, or imagine, something is out there).

Over the weekend, Jasmine and daughter, Mittens, managed to shred (very quietly, while no one was looking) the screen in one of the windows of the breakfast nook. They chose the window with the barbecue grill parked underneath so they didn't have a high jump down onto the ground but could take it in steps. I don't know how long they were out before I noticed how quiet it was and went looking, in vain, through all the rooms for them. It was a good ten minutes of searching before I noticed Jasmine under the mango.

This was Mittens' first time out and she seemed a little spooked by it all. She was still by the grill and tried jumping back in the window that way when I came for her, but I had already closed it. She was easy to catch and, I think, a little relieved to be returned to safety.  Jasmine, on the other hand, had made a career of living rough before she came to us all knocked up and she was enjoying herself out there. I couldn't get within ten feet of her. I put a dish of kibble in the lanai and tried to block off all but one access route but she didn't fall for it. I consoled myself with the realization that she's grown so fat she poses no threat to the birds, or the squirrel or any but the stupidest lizard.

Three hours later, after sunset, she came to the front door in the pitch dark and begged to come in.

I mentioned up top that my brother repaired three windows. That's because this wasn't Jasmine's first breakout. She went through the bottom of the screen in his bathroom window a couple weeks ago and I noticed her wandering through the lanai and snagged her then (which may be why she stayed out of it this time). She also damaged the window over his tub.

Meanwhile, Paribanour lay comfortably atop her DVR set top box the whole time. She got out, accidentally, once before for all of two minutes and less than a foot from the front door and did not like it at all, no thank you. She much prefers her TV/DVR/my laptop and other tech to adventuring in the wild.

Fer Mowin' or Fer Ownin'?

Which is the punchline to an Old New England Farmer joke: A guy moves up from the big city and buys a smallish farm next door to a native New Englander. While inspecting his purchase he notices that there are no boundary markers and the fields just sort of merge into each other. He approaches the old farmer and asks, "Say, neighbor, can you tell me where my property ends and yours begins?" The farmer thinks on it for a moment and responds, asking, "Depends. . . . (see headline, above).

It's one of the reasons Robert Frost thought good walls made good neighbors. There is no wall between our place and Neighbor Mike's.

Which is not any kind of issue, except that Neighbor Mike has apparently thought recently of selling and, as part of the plan, called in someone to examine his place and his title to it and that person discovered that Mike has been mowing a strip of our property almost from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, at least one of Mike's irrigation sprinkler heads is buried a couple of feet over on our side of the line.

My brother discovered this a few days ago when he went looking for a place to plant the pecan tree (potentially awesome present) he received for Christmas. (Actually,what he got for Christmas was a picture of a pecan tree, but the actual stick finally showed up courtesy of UPS.) He noticed a string running parallel to what he thought was our property line and followed it to little flags staked out to the front and back of the territory. Mike confirmed that the survey says everything to the east of the string is actually ours.

It's not much. A few hundred square feet at most. Despite nobody knowing where the real line was, and despite Mike mowing it, he has not, by his actions, claimed it and we have not alienated it.  And now we all know, so it stays ours.

Although we have to admit: Mike did a good job caring for it.

Just As We Suspected

Our smoke detector started going off on short random bursts the night before last. I figured the battery might be low so I retrieved a ladder from the lanai room and attempted to change it.

Attempted, I say, because the ladder was only eight feet tall and the alarm is set a good 14 feet up in the cathedral-ceilinged living room, right next to the air conditioning vent and just outside my brother's bedroom door. I'm not really happy with heights as it is and, standing on the top rung, I could barely reach the plastic disc only to find that it is not battery operated at all but attached firmly to the wall by the electrical wires that power it. I found this out by twisting the disc in a manner that would unscrew a normal battery powered model but succeeded only in wrenching it from the wall to hang dangling.

My brother came home to find the vandalized alarm hanging in a most accusatory manner, the ladder in the living room and cats resting on the lower rungs. I had thought that he, being taller than I, would want to fix the thing since the alarm was still going off on a random, if less frequent, basis but he said he had a larger ladder outside and would take care of it in the morning so I shook the cats off the rungs and dragged it back out onto the lanai.

When I came home last night, he had pulled the thing completely off the wall which means we have no smoke detector now although that doesn't bother me all that much since the only times it has ever gone off, other than this instance, is when my brother burns his supper which we already know because of the smell. (It didn't go off the night Mom draped a nylon top over her quartz heater. I woke to the smell of burning plastic, went into Mom's room, and managed to unplug the heater and pull the melting shirt off it before anything actually caught fire. Mom, who otherwise would have slept through the whole thing, was duly embarrassed and promised never to do anything like that again which, to her credit and despite the increasing dementia, she never did.)

My brother had, by then, moved the bigger, 15 foot tall ladder into his room so he could clean his ceiling fan but, before he could start, the cats found it. Mittens climbed all the way to the very top. And was obviously stuck there. The look on her face said there was no possibility of her
ever climbing down that steep slope (and this is the cat that climbs screen doors all the way to the top and back down again). Paribanour started up after her, very slowly, and only got about two thirds of the way up before she, too, froze. My brother climbed up to retrieve them but they maintained death grips on the rungs. He almost lost his balance pulling Paribanour off. He couldn't climb back down holding the cats and had to toss each one down to me as he pried them loose.

They're now banned from his room until he's done cleaning and the ladder goes back outdoors. Because they will not learn from experience. Mittens was so desperate to take a second crack at the ladder, she spent ten minutes clawing at his door to get back in.

So, yeah, after last night, I don't see a Christmas tree going up any time soon.

Critterman Redux

My brother claimed something was scuttling around in his wall again over the weekend, the same spot the 'possum was pulled out of recently.

I didn't hear it and the cats were not acting any more weirdly than usual (it was Jasmine's turn to sneak outside when no one was looking and when we did the headcount and realized she was AWOL my brother let her back in but she'd picked up some strange smell or something only the kids could notice and she hissed and snarled at them whenever they got close to the point where they were ready to forgo dinner rather than share the plate with her) although as just noted they were not acting any less weirdly than usual either. My brother scheduled the Critterman to come back today.

He was up in the attic for a half hour or so banging around and pulled at least one juvenile opossum from the same wall space the first one had occupied. He and my brother are now touring around the outside of the house identifying all the possible entry points after which Critterman will block them up as cheaply as possible.

I suspect this is merely a skirmish. The war may last all winter.

Paribanour's Might've-Been Excellent Adventure

The cats were "out" last evening when my brother came home. He informed me later that he'd let Jasmine and Mittens in but Paribanour was too comfortable where she was and didn't want to move. As I was getting ready to quit for the night, I opened the door to let her in.

No Paribanour.

I searched around in the house in case she had changed her mind at the last moment (they do that frequently) and slipped in behind my brother as he was closing the door. (Mittens is a master at sneaking into my bedroom or bathroom without me noticing and then dashing behind/under the bookcase, the easy chair or the commode where I can not reach her. The solution is always to leave the room and close the door behind me. Within a couple of minutes, she invariably wants to get out again and will sit by the door until I reopen it.) My search turned up only two cats.

The problem is the outer door latch no longer works. I purchased a new "universal" latch but our old latch apparently was not "universal" and so the screw holes for the new one do not match up. My brother claims to have a drill buried somewhere in the garage and has promised, in his redneck way, to find it for me but that's somewhere way down on his list of things to maybe get around to someday. And until last night it made no difference anyway since the cats were all perfectly content to just lie around in the foyer and watch the world go by.

Last night Paribanour figured out how to open the door.

I'm pretty sure it was an accident. I think she surprised herself. Nevertheless,  . . . curiosity and all that . . . out she went.

Being a house kitten, she has no concept of the big world out there and certainly no clue how to deal with the opossums, raccoons, dogs and cars we know are in the neighborhood let alone anything more exotic (coyote) that might come wandering by.

I don't know how long she was out. Fortunately, she either didn't go far or was just returning when I went out to find her because she was in the grass right at the edge of the walkway lights. Otherwise I would have been searching for an all-over dark gray cat in the night shadows. She made me chase her a little but wouldn't leave the walkway so that game didn't last long.

So all's well that ends well. And my brother promises to find the drill. Soon. He says.

And Hallowe'en Is Still Over Two Weeks Away

I went out this morning to the library and as I drove down our main neighborhood street (the one that had the  lane removed and turned into a bike way and is soon to get sidewalks) I passed a house with the most extraordinary--and scary--lawn display.

The entire frontage facing the street, from property line to property line, was piled literally five feet high (more in some spots) with furniture, clothing and large, bulging, black plastic trash bags. They made a wall, a berm, a blockade across the entire access to the house. There were a trio of pick-up trucks parked on the street and median (the driveway was blocked). From the size of the house and the sheer volume of the mountain range of trash out front, I can only surmise the occupants must be/have been classic hoarders. I can not imagine how it would be possible to stuff that volume of stuff into the available space.

I have no idea if this is the result of an intervention or merely the cleansing after an estate sale.

The funny thing is, the outside property itself has always been well cared for. Lawn mowed. Shrubberies trimmed. No litter. There was never any indication that anything might be amiss inside.

I feel the urge to recycle some old paperwork and magazines, now. And catalogs. They're coming in fast, now, too.

A Visit From the Critterman

Last night the cats started acting weirder than usual. At first they were just tearing around the house with too much energy, racing each other (mom included) across the living room, sliding on the coffee table, over the couch, onto the recliner by way of the TV tray, into the kitchen and onto the window sill (or all the way up to the curtain rods). And then back again.

Suddenly, it became very still and quiet. When I looked around from where I was doing dishes I saw the kids trying to climb the front of the bookcase and mama all the way up on top, over six feet up where she had never gone before, and threatening one of Mom's ceramics. She backed as far away from the edge as she could and, although I could just reach her, I couldn't get the leverage to haul her down. There was a dull, rhythmic thumping behind her which I assumed was her tail against the wall.

I called my brother, who is taller, to help and when he came out of his room, which shares that wall, he took one look at Jasmine and said, "So that's what all the noise is about." He was wrong.

After we hauled the cat down, the noise continued. Jasmine, incensed at being forcibly removed from her discovery leapt from a side table to a small but slightly taller curio stand (knocking over a vaguely disturbing articulated painted wooden wizard/clown "doll" of unknown provenance) to the top of the old TV onto the bookcase, thus explaining how she got there the first time. Something was in the wall and she had dibs.

My brother, after yelling at all the cats sufficiently to keep them off the bookcase, spent the night listening to whatever it was skittering around.

First thing this morning he called an animal removal guy who came out, crawled into our attic and removed a smallish 'possum that had fallen inside the wall and couldn't climb out on its own. He also found and blocked up the hole that had allowed the 'possum to get into the attic in the first place although he warned that his fix will not prevent raccoons from gaining entry if they want because they have those nimble, tricksy fingers and can literally pull the patch apart.

The 'possum is now on its way to the local (semi-)wilderness where it will be set free to live happily away from people and near to the pythons and panthers and black bears and alligators and tegus and whatever else is hiding out there.

Good luck, little fella!

Lumpen Cat and Punk Kitten

I came home yesterday to Bartleby lying in the middle of the driveway just taking in the sun. She's decided that living outside again is preferable to sharing a house with other cats and, especially, kittens. She can be found parked under my car or my brother's truck depending on which of us is home.

Usually, if neither of us is around she'll lie off to the side of the driveway and lift her head the least possible amount to see who is arriving when we return. Yesterday, she lay right in the middle of my side blocking the way. I pulled up slowly until I couldn't see her in front anymore hoping she would walk away. She didn't move. I honked the horn. She didn't blink. I got out and went round to the front where she lay nearly under the bumper and told her that, while I appreciated the trust she put in me not to run her over, she really needed to shift her butt. True to her namesake, she preferred not to.

So I physically picked her up and carried her to the top of the driveway and deposited her, limp but unprotesting, by the walkway and proceeded to finish parking.

Speaking of the walkway, I have spent the last week cleaning out weeds between pavers and along the edges. It's really a one day job but I restricted myself to the hour or so each day after the sun sinks behind the house putting the walkway in shadow and before the mosquitoes and other bitey critters come out to feed. And each day Bartleby would stroll over, look at what I was doing and plop herself down right in front of me. So I'd work around her until, having moved sufficiently beyond, she'd get up and park in front of me again thus allowing me to go back and clean up the Bartleby-shaped patch I'd left behind. It's kind of a system we've worked out.

Meanwhile, in the house, it seems Mittens is developing something of a black stripe on her back similar to Paribanour's chipmunk markings. Mittens' stripe is much narrower, however, and since the black stripey fur is longer than the background gray fur (as it is on Paribanour, as well) it tends to get pushed up giving Mittens something of a Mohawk. Which makes her even more bad-ass when she's picking fights with her bigger sister. She needs an earring.

Things That Delighted Me This Weekend

Seven or eight teensy little ants (two of them could easily fit on a sesame seed) found a rather large dead spider (comparatively speaking. The body was maybe a half inch across) and dragged the corpse by the legs up an outside wall. Six ants each grabbed the very tip of a leg and pulled while the others pushed on the thorax. It was slow going and a constant stream of fellow ants flowed in both directions up and down the wall just off to their side but they persisted.

A pair of electric Day-Glo pistachio green parrots attacked the bougainvillea by the front door and with no concern for either the cats or me less than twelve feet away worked with their beaks, sometimes upside down, to twist and break off the topmost dead branchlets for nest construction material.

I caught a faint scent of night-blooming jasmine last evening when I went out to feed Bartleby who has moved outdoors, where she cannot be bothered by kittens, while the weather is nice. I can think of nothing more exotic and civilized at the same time than a warm dark evening under stars and moonlight in a garden of jasmine.

It rained. I've been working on the front walkway, cleaning out growth between stones, edging, pulling weeds and turning soil and it rained briefly but heavily yesterday afternoon, a foretaste of Rainy Season which officially starts in a week or so. When it stopped, the living smell of freshly turned wet earth rose up and made the whole exercise worthwhile.

The first mango dropped from the tree. It was warm and sweet and a harbinger for summer. There are more than a hundred ripening on it right now.

It was a good weekend.

Miscellanea

Well, both eagle eggs have hatched and the chicks seem to be doing fine. The parents have brought in a load of fish for the entire family (and all the flies in the neighborhood). People are coming around to visit, too, (you can see them in the background of the web cam) but they're generally pretty good about respecting the eagles' "personal space."

 Meanwhile the privateer Lynx has arrived in town (actually across the river) and is open to visitors. The original Lynx was a raked schooner used as a blockade runner during the War of 1812 and was captured and renamed by the British. The current Lynx, the owners are careful to point out, is not officially a replica, despite an amazing attention to detail in the reconstruction, since they have added some modern amenities . . . including an engine.














Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the Christmas tree is half down, the former koi pond is completely filled in although not landscaped and my brother has given a first coat of paint to the wood he bought to repair the lanai room.

And Bartleby has had a relapse on her perching binge from last year. We're continually chasing her off various tables: coffee, TV, dining and "memorial" (an antique oval marble-top that holds a bunch of family portraits and gives a nice cat-view out the front window), which is kind of hypocritical since we encourage her to snuggle in our laps in the easy chair or couch. It's a distinction her little kitty brain just can't process.

Deconstructing The Old Year

Our nephews came down for the New Year celebrations. They were down here to party with friends so, technically, they just used our house as a base of operations but they did visit for a while when their sister and mom returned from Georgia and they also helped tear up the back yard which was a good thing.

My brother has long wanted to remove the small mound out back that Dad built years ago. It originally contained a rock garden and a small working waterfall feeding a stream that emptied into a koi pond. The mound was built on a base consisting of the excavated dirt from the pond. On top of that, Dad stacked a short ton of coral boulders glued together with cement. The watercourse from the fall to the pond was lined with river stones embedded in cement. The pond was a homemade basin of cement over a sheet of black waterproof plastic liner and edged with slate cemented into place. Dad was a frustrated landscape architect and concrete was his medium.

The overall effect was very pleasant for several years but, eventually, the underlying earth sank a bit and the water didn't flow properly and the pump stopped and the whole thing was too tightly cemented together for the operating guts to be accessible to repair and so it became simply a pond with a slight rise in the background. The folks added and aerator to the pond and the fish were happy.

The fish were happy for a while, anyway. I was on the phone with Mom one day when she suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, look at the great blue heron!" which, of course, being on the phone from Connecticut, I could not, but she described in detail how it had just landed in the pond. Her excitement was understandable. Great blue herons are magnificent birds and not that common, even down here, are usually spotted at long range off in a swamp somewhere, and to have one standing not more than 20 feet from the back door was extraordinary. It was only after the great blue had flown that Mom realized the visit might have been somewhat less than exceptional and that, in fact, they had invited the heron by setting out such an easily accessible goldfish buffet. A few of the smaller fish survived by hiding under the leaves overhanging the edge of the pond but they were too traumatized to ever come out of the shadows again.

Dad died and the pond and mound became overgrown. The last of the fish were eaten by some other bird (no witnesses this time) and the water was allowed to evaporate. My brother didn't make any changes while Mom was alive because she liked some of the flowers that took root there.

That all changed this past weekend. The nephews gave my brother a new sledge hammer and chain saw for Christmas. I gave him a new orange tree. On New Year's Eve day we all went out and started dismantling the pond with the sledgehammer (my brother initially claimed he didn't need a new one so the boys started off with the old one but it broke about ten minutes in (Dad always made bunker-grade concrete.)) and the overgrowth with the chain saw.

The nephews have now gone back to base. The project's not done yet. The walls of the pond are completely broken up and it is about two-thirds filled in with rubble and dirt. The mound is half gone. We will have extra volume remaining thanks to the cement fill. The coral boulders have been rolled back to the property line in preparation for we know-not-what further use. The trees and bushes are down (with the exception of the central trunk of the tree on which the mockingbirds built their nest last summer where its ruins still perch) and the branches hauled out front for disposal.

The area looks disturbingly like a mass grave. Sod or grass seed will take care of that. What's worse, we can now see the neighbors.

Redneck Studies

Continuing my studies of my brother's acquired redneck tendencies, I have concluded that another defining characteristic is the inability to bring any project to completion.

This is not to say that required repairs are left undone or that desired outcomes are not achieved. They are. But the redneck mindset sees reaching the goal as the end of the road and does not recognize the necessity/desirability to return the scene to the status quo ante.

Thus, the clothes dryer is repaired after blowing the starter mechanism but the tools used to replace the motor are still in the laundry room.

The piece of loose siding up under the eaves over the garage that revealed the hole by which the various creatures that have shared our house with us have entered has been reattached, but the ladder my brother used to climb onto the overhang remains in place providing a convenient way up for more critters.

A dead inflatable Hallowe'en lawn decoration, after a failed resuscitation attempt, lies scrunched up against the garage door, both guy and electrical wires trailing across the driveway like the tentacles of some decaying orange squid.

The trash cans can not fit into their faux picket fenced enclosure because it is "temporarily" filled with empty cardboard boxes removed from the overstuffed garage in some vain attempt to make it passable. The fact that my brother must climb over the boxes in order to turn on the lawn sprinkler system is not enough to motivate him to remove them. At least, sitting in the driveway, they block the view of the "squid" from passersby on the street.

I attempt to zero out the various projects whenever I can but new ones keep popping up.

Planning Ahead

I went to turn on the lamp Mom and I use most often in the living room yesterday evening and it wouldn't work. Mom said she thought the bulb was out but it's a CFL and fairly new. I switched the bulb out for one from the lamp on the other side of the couch (also CFL) but that wouldn't work either which led me to believe there was something wrong with the lamp. Except neither bulb worked in the second lamp, either. So.

These lamps are on the same circuit as the microwave in the kitchen with which they share the wall and an in-kitchen circuit breaker. The microwave was fine. The circuit breaker was fine. The telephone, which is plugged into the same outlet as the first lamp was fine. So either there was something wrong with both lamps or there was something wrong with the top outlet of the double wall plug. I switch the phone and the lamp and . . . the lamp worked. So I moved the plug for the second lamp from the top of its outlet to the bottom. It worked. There was something screwy with the top half of both outlets.

Then my brother called from work.

He wanted to let me know that in an attempt to keep Mom in her room at night he had disabled the living room lamps on the theory that she would rather not just sit in the dark. He did this by flipping a switch over by the front door and had forgotten to flip it back again.

There is a switch, over by the front door, about as far away from these lamps as one can get, that does nothing but turn on and off the top halves of two separate outlets. That's it. The top halves of two outlets. Nothing else.

Who . . . when this house was being built and wired twenty-five years ago . . . ever thought that would be a necessary or desirable feature?