Interesting times.

[rivka]

We have a lovely enclosed courtyard behind our house. One side is the exterior wall of the house next door, covered with a noble and ancient growth of ivy.

Quite a lot of ivy.

Heavy ivy, some of the branches thicker than my thumb. Much of it dead.

In a torrential rainstorm on Thursday, all of the ivy slid off the wall. (Our neighbor, who saw it from her window, said "I felt like I was watching a movie.") It crumpled like a curtain, collapsing gently into a series of zigzags, still woven tightly together. Still higher than my head.

We were at work, so we had no idea. The first sign that anything was odd came when Michael went outside to get the trash on Friday evening, and walked right into a seven-foot-high pile of vines. In the dark.

At this point, you're probably not really appreciating how much debris is in our courtyard right now. We estimate that it's somewhere around seventeen hundred cubic feet of latticed-together dead and dying ivy. It's a lot of ivy.

The worst part: somewhere in the center is our phone line. When the phone company hooked the house up to the network, they took advantage of the handy loops and hooks provided by the wallful of ivy. The phone line fought a good fight - we still had service right up until Saturday morning - but eventually the pile of settling debris ripped it from its connection, and now we have no phone or DSL service at home.

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm in my office at work. But that's okay, because tomorrow, instead of coming to work, I'll be waiting at home all day for the Verizon repair crew. I'll get to see the expression on their faces when I show them where the phone line is. I hope that will partially make up for the hassle and delay which will surely be involved in restoring service.

Our landlord says he'll come out next weekend to haul the debris away. I really don't think he has any idea. I tried to explain it to him over the phone, but I think he thinks he'll be able to come out, bag it up, and carry it away in his pickup truck. Heh.

Comments

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I am looking forward to your report on the expressions on the faces of the Verizon repair folks. I suppose making them come out with their eyes closed, pointing a digital camera at them, then saying, "Okay, open your eyes!" would be out of the question? :P

[brooksmoses]

I'm sure they'll have one thing to be thankful for, though, if they've done much work out in the rural areas: it's not poison ivy!

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I don't think they'll care where the phone line is. They'll string a new line anyway.

B

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Spoilsport :):).

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

The ivy went all the way to the top of a three-story brick wall, and it goes back approximately thirty feet. It's this ginormous pile, and I think they're going to have to attack it with chainsaws. Manual cutters would take about a hundred years.

What's going to be real fun is seeing them get the stuff out of the yard. Because of the way the walls around it are built, they're either going to have to carry it through our house to the street, or chuck it over a fence into our neighbor's yard and then get it through his gate to the street.

I'm hoping that they just restring the phone line and write the old one off entirely. If they can do that (although I'm not sure if they can actually get to the place where it enters the house), then we might have service fairly quickly. Let's keep our fingers crossed on that one.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

There isn't a chance in the world that they'll try to reuse the old phone line. Phone lines are cheap; time is expensive. Stringing a new line is almost always easier, and definitely easier in your case.

That's a lot of ivy, by the way.

B

[kightp.livejournal.com]

*nervously eyes the ivy covering the side-yard fence outside my office window*

*thinks about the ivy festooning the Italian prune tree out back*

Um. Yipes.

*adds new item to next year's Home Improvement list*

[melebeth]

I can't stop giggling as I imagine Michael's face as he walked into that. But Geez. What a mess. Every time the Ivy from next door overwhelms me it takes hours to cut it down, and it's not even that much. That stuff is a pain in the ass. Maybe they'll bring in a Crane and lift the squirming writhing mass of brown and green right over the roof. That... that... would be AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yikes! That's a LOT of ivy. If you decide that you're going to have some kind of volunteer community effort to chop it up and drag it away, let me know.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

*long, low, whistle, because I can't think of anything else to say*

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

take pictures? please?

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

What she said ... I can envisage this, but I'd love to see it.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Thirded! :D

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's just amazing.

I bet "dead and dying" is not as true as a person might think, either. (Okay, you said there was dead already, but I'll bet the rest would happily grow right where it is if you left it alone.)

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

You need a lot of goats!

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a _lot_ of ivy.

The ivy on the side fence of our property makes occasional forays into our (not terribly well built) sunroom. Reminds me, I have to go snip some ivy branches.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Wow.

That's...something.