Interesting times.
Nov. 7th, 2004 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaWe 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-07 09:32 pm (UTC)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.)