Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Despite having tree parts and destruction debris atop them, the gardenias still bloom….
File this away: after you have a tree fall on your house, do not be surprised if, after you do a load of laundry that includes clothing that had been recovered from beneath the tree (and mushed house), you find pieces of wood in the washer.
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
I was downtown today….
Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar.
The words of Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (originally published 1964; this is from a second edition paperback)….
I never would have connected typography and nationalism to tightly—not familiar to me.
Lemme get this posted. The winds are rising as I type. Fortunately, it sounds like the worst of the storms and the large hail will miss us to the north. Of course, since we have a tarp roof, even wind and rain is of concern….
Monday, 19 May 2008
I wonder how they got this bicolor, fancy rose.
My brother says the tree that fell was afflicted with butt rot. I think that might have been true of the first one, too.
JCB says that’s not something you’d wish on either man or beast (I’m paraphrasing).
JCB has also put together a photo album of scenes from the immediate post-fall through the tree removal to tarp installation.
Sunday, 18 May 2008
Escape Day Number 2 Report: talking, laughing, IKEA, Trader Joe’s, walk to/in the park.
Perhaps my biggest coup today was finding this pepper mill at IKEA—on sale! For $4.99 (plus tax)!
The info said it had a ceramic grinder, which is superior to steel ones. I had no idea. I took the risk and made the buy, and wow, it does a great job with a fine grind—just what I was looking for!
Yeah, I know it’s plastic, and kinda wacky-looking, but, hey, the grind is perfect!
I have a long history of having substandard or not-quite-right pepper grinders, so I’m tickled to have found this one! I may get several more, and spread the ground-pepper-love!
I’m late posting this because of 1) poor camera management, and 2) a bit of laziness. You see, I forgot the camera downstairs—the designated iPhoto computer’s upstairs—and it sometimes feels like such an effort to go through the zipwall airlocks at the top and bottom of the staircase…. So, I decided to wait until I had an additional reason to undertake the vertical trek (bathroom, food, hot tea, cold water?). Who am I kidding: it’s really just laziness!
Saturday, 17 May 2008
Is this what they mean by negative space?
We imported a friend to distract us this weekend, and distract us he has!
Late this morning, he and I went to the Southeast Region office of the National Archives and looked at some of the TVA records. When the government ousted all those folks so they could flood their land, they did social work/outreach as part of the resettlement. I looked at case records for some of the 800-odd families who had to move for one reservoir in Alabama, and geeze those folks were poor. For some perspective, a chicken was valued at 50¢ and I saw one mason’s helper made 25¢ per hour; this was in the 1930s.
The photos were all mixed up, and haven’t been indexed, so we couldn’t know where the Alabama ones were in the acid-free archive boxes. Out of the thousands of negatives, we pulled only a few, and as luck would have it, none were from Alabama.
This farm in this lovely valley is in Tennessee, however; the photo was from 1942. It is labeled as the Mack Swann Farm, Jefferson County. Here’s a wee bit about Mack Swann’s wife and her family….
And that excursion was over by 1:30 pm!
Friday, 16 May 2008
I am mystified as to how this plant came to be in our backyard, in a semi-abandoned flower bed. It looks like a jack-in-the-pulpit to me, and I think of them as forest floor plants, certainly not as volunteers in an urban setting. I can remember no introduced soil-stuffs to have brought it in, at least in the last twenty years. It seems unlikely that the seed remained from when this area last was forested sometime back in the nineteenth century.
So, birds? Seems most likely….
As to the house, today was mostly pretty quiet, no contractor-types poking around. John pressed forward with cleaning and organizing and I did some work, and allocated energy to making a “nice” Friday-night dinner*. We shared it with our weekend guest, who arrived just before I put the fresh, wild, Gulf shrimp in the skillet, and sauteed them with sliced shitakes and garlic, with a splurp of half-and-half added at the end. Plus fresh ground pepper. Sides of mashed potatoes and broccoli. Tossed salad with avocado chunks and slices of canned red pepper. Yum.
* The restaurants in our area are swamped on Friday nights, so we eat in to avoid excessive hubbub. Helps with the budget, too….
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Most of the dining room furniture has migrated (temporarily I hope) into the living room, along with miscellany like a ladder and shower buckets. The hazy blue smudge you see through the right side of the zipwall is the roof tarp hanging down outside the window. For ironic humor, note that the brown book on the coffee table is the scrapbook of our 1991 Tree Event, with the front-page newspaper picture of us catty-whumpus on top.
That’s today’s new vocabulary. It’s a registered trademark for a system for isolating areas within a building, for construction or whatever. What we got isn’t the full shebang I see on the Zipwall website, but instead merely the zippers (here’s the zipper link; beware of instant audio!) applied to everyday sheet plastic.
So now, thanks to the miracle of tape and plastic, the exterior air is isolated from our living space. Along with the portable HEPA filter unit the contractor brought over, we expect to reduce our allergen load compared to the last few days—which really hasn’t been so bad the last few days, but with today’s rain, can be expected to ramp up.
The result of all this is that our staircase, punctured in the devastation, is now bracketed by zipwalls at top and bottom, so a night-time foray to the necessary room is somewhat like camping or a safari, but with two “sssssssshhuhtttt” moments as you complete your passage through the stairway airlock.
I am learning to plan ahead*.
* Learning is the operative word: I made two trips to accomplish this blog entry—one for the camera, and a second for the forgotten transfer cable.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
And the floor isn’t safe, either, at least off in the distance….
This is the current view from the master bedroom into the (former) master bath. That’s the edge of the sink in the front left corner, and you can see a peek of the soaking tub beyond the low knee wall (mostly intact). Then, it’s some version of the wild blue yonder where the doorway into the throne/shower area was.
We’re informed that the brown tarp is thicker, and covers lower areas with sharper pokey-uppy-things, with the thinner blue tarps in the upper areas, all of it layered like shingles.
Rain’s headed our way from Alabama if I read the weather maps correctly. So, soon this temporary buffering between outdoors and indoors will be tested.
I particularly like the (accidental, happenstance—really!) juxtaposition of the toothbrush cup and the vagrant oak leaf on the counter by the sink….
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Everybody’s been wonderful.
Our many, many neighbors. Our friends we’ve talked to and emailed with. Family near and far…. Random strangers who served us food and coffee. The insurance guy. The chainsaw guys—whew! The chainsaw guys were exceptional—delicate hands, extremely hardworking—the Odd Job guys were the right ones for our problem*. The crane guy. Our mailman (we’ll miss him when he retires!). Our contractor-to-be. The rug people. The tarp guys.
Our poor neighbors who “owned” this renegade tree….
And representing all these terrific people, this Georgia Power fellow who reconnected us to the grid! With wit and panache!
* The magician who did the tough cutting on the tree trunk is shown on this Odd Job page….
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
I guess it’s time for details. The tree fell sometime around 9 pm on Sunday night. We had gusty winds associated with a solid front (well-marked on the weather maps, anyway), but no rain—thankfully! We were in the back of the house watching TV, very close to the back door, and that was our escape path away from the noise/tree crashing into front corner of the house, although we didn’t know what part of the house was being crushed. Your brain tells you: big noise in the wrong place; move feet to transport body (ears?) away from that sound!
The electricity stayed on for almost two minutes (it seemed) before going out with dramatic fireworks at the pole by the street in front of the house. We later discovered that the tops of the highest branches (formerly highest branches, actually), had dragged the wire down enough to short out something important but not enough to bring them down to the ground. I guess the tree finally settled enough that we lost power.
Some of our neighbors had heard the tree fall, but with the lights out (and the looming darkness caused by the top of the tree on the ground), they couldn’t tell where the tree was!
As we tried to scout the house and figure out the damage, our soundscape was dominated by water, which my brain couldn’t process, but John’s did, figuring out it was coming from the pipes in the master bath, which had been mostly obliterated by the tree. One neighbor is a contractor and another is a retired fireman, and both were in the street, so I hollered down from our porch for them to please cut off our water if they could, as John talked to 911. They found a key and did so, but the water ran for almost 10 minutes, I estimate.
Eventually, maybe 25 people were milling in the yard, making sure everyone was okay, etc., all the best you hope for from your neighbors!
Unlike in 1991 when Tree Number One fell, we now have the iPhone and the situation has been oh so different. We stayed that first night at John’s brother’s, after removing hard drives and computers, and locking the doors. We’d already called the insurance people, and lined up tree removal people for the next day.
The tree guys came shortly after 8 am, and looked the situation over. Decided they needed a big crane to lift the main trunk off the house, which would limit damage. Ordered a crane, found out one could come that afternoon (Monday). The crew cleaned out enough so we could extricate the Prius (just flipped over 15K miles), and the dents are relatively minor, which is a miracle given that the tree’s limbs embraced the vehicle from all sides.
At that point my major stress came from: 1) not knowing how much damage we had to deal with, including how much more the house would suffer as the trunk was removed. This was a BIG tree, and 2) not being able to reach our neighbors by phone—the neighbors who owned the base of the tree.
When they finally returned home after a long holiday weekend, the 70-ton crane was busy and many people were standing on their lawn watching the amazing work going on. They were shocked to say the least.
Here’s the current situation. The tree guys finished the removal this morning (look at the diameter of the trunk!) and cleaned the yard before they left. Our landscaping plants look pretty droopy, but the hardscaping is undamaged. Or at least I haven’t noticed any. That mini herb garden I was planning to blog (brag?) about—wiped out.
John’s brother helped move precious crap to safer parts of the house, and to get the wet Persian (-like) rug we inherited from the Burns family home moved out of the dining room. We dropped it off at the amazing rug place before rush hour traffic got too bad; they’ve cleaned this family carpet before.
The tarp guys are removing some of the crap preparatory to building what is necessary to make the house shed water once again. We will be Blue Tarp People—or maybe there’s another color? They have capped the water pipes going upstairs and the water’s back on. They have isolated the upstairs wiring and JCB’s called Georgia Power and they will turn the electricity back on quite soon. Yes, today! Amazing!
* JCB coined this one; I borrowed it unashamedly!