Old and Weary

 The baby birds are growing. Soon that nest will be way too small.

This is site 1. I have spent the last 2 days here. The water line broke and had to be dug up. Sounds simple, huh? I was down here weeding the garden and heard a hissing noise from the hydrant. When I say "dug up", I am talking about a huge hole 10 feet deep. The problem was fixed and it should have been a simple matter of filling the hole.

He who digs hit the retaining wall ...... well, both retaining walls. The wood was pretty much rotten and had to be replaced and the walls rebuilt. He who builds realized he lacked the skill and brute force to do the job alone and enlisted one of his cronies to help. They did a great job.

I was left will all the debris to clean up and make the site inhabitable. I raked, I dug, I seeded grass and burned tons of leaves and rotting wood. Two snakes gave their lives.

This is the garden on the back side of the site. Lots of hostas and day lilies lounging in the shade. I plan to cram so many lilies in that it will choke out all the weeds. Low maintenance and all ......

Dead tree needs to be removed. Could fall on the electrical line, so we called Ameren UE. A guy came out the same day. That, in itself was shocking. He said they would be out to take care of it "soon".

So, when a man entered the office late this afternoon wearing a hard hat and a shirt with Ameren's logo, what do you think I thought? Right you are, if you are thinking that I was excited at the quick response. I mean, the man had a hard hat on! He was about 6'5" and the hat added another three inches. So, I eagerly lead him to the tree, a little concerned that he is in an SUV, no equipment or bucket truck. But maybe he was going to haul out a chainsaw and snatch that big tree down.

I was wrong. He was here to check out the tree and tell me that Ameren would not be taking care of it after all. He said that if they had a crew close by, they would help me out, but that he could not justify the expense unless they had another job in the area. He suggested that I hire a qualified tree surgeon.

I weighed my options and decided not to applaud his frugal use of resources and suggest that he talk to the department in charge of billing and see if he could convince them to mail all seven of my bills in one envelope. Instead, I played the age card and told him that my husband was elderly and just shy of crazy and would no doubt attempt to take the tree down himself. I then reminded him that when his crews were working in our area we allowed them to park their equipment in our park overnight to save on fuel. I decided he didn't need to know it was a contractor  working for Ameren and that they gave me tons of mulch ........ I just told him that I allowed them to offload it here.

He finally came around and told me he would put the work order in, but that it wouldn't be a priority and might be as long as a month before they got to my tree. I am still patting myself on the back.

The new retaining wall looks good. The lighting was bad on this shot and I saw a kamper pulling in as I was taking the picture, so I had to go back to work.

I rented the site out and the new tenants will be in tomorrow. They looked at site last weekend and it was pretty rough. I cleaned it up, painted the picnic table and seeded grass. After that I mowed my back yard and did the dishes from two days. Then we painted the pool until night fell.

When my head hits the pillow, I will sleep. I hope.