vituperation

I know I’ve gone on and on (and on) about the big trees around the Smallville house. I can’t help it; I love them. You all know how I feel about hiking, and being among the trees on the mountain, so having these around is a little bit like being up there in one of the flat areas. Wonderful.

Yesterday, when I first got to the house, I wandered around the back yard and was struck anew by how majestic the trees are. This time, I had an idea and took pictures. I’ve stitched several together into one big composite picture that gives an idea of what it feels like to be standing just outside the back of the house.

Hopefully it will convey the feeling that I can’t.

See it here. Best viewed by first making sure it’s full sized and not resized to fit your browser, then by going to the bottom and slowly scrolling back up to the top.

What’s coolest is that we’re surrounded by trees like that.

In all the excitement with the fallen tree on Tuesday I failed to notice something else that happened at the same time. I didn’t notice it until Wednesday, when I needed to go into the workshop side of the shed for something.

There was standing water in the corner of the shed. Oddly enough, I had just noticed last weekend that the corner support for the shed was starting to rot, and attributed it to 75 years of wear and tear. Now I understood why it was starting to rot.

We had a good long soaking rain Thursday, so Robyn and I ran out there when I got off work so I could get pictures of what was happening and begin to formulate a solution. This is what it looked like:

Luckily, I have the tools to build an ark if need be.

I will refrain from commenting on how someone could live with this situation and not want to remedy it immediately.

I stitched together a couple of pictures, and put labels on to show what was happening:

Look at the pretty yellow poison ivy to contend with.

There was a small hump in the earth, coinciding with the line of railroad tie fenceposts that make up part of the fence that goes around most of the perimeter of our property. I don’t know if the hump has anything to do with the fence line or not, but it needed to be dealt with, because it was causing water to back up and stand at the base of the shed.

As I saw it, there were two possible solutions. I could dig a trench along the shed wall, fill it with gravel and a drainage pipe, and slope it to the lower ground—that’s called a french drain, if you didn’t know—or I could use the box blade on my tractor to cut a swale in the ground so water would run away from the building.

I think we all know what Fred chose.

Before I could solve the water problem, we had to deal with several things: loads and loads of stringy viny brush, poison ivy, and a row of railroad ties driven three feet into the ground. Not to mention the five strands of barbed wire strung between them.

Speaking of old rusty barbed wire, guess who scratched and now gets to have a tetanus shot tomorrow?

Robyn cleared away much of the brush and poison ivy while I dealt with the fence posts and the larger shrubbery. Here’s how I dealt with the fence posts:

Like I’ve said before…

…there’s nothing you can’t do with a tractor and a good piece of chain.

Note in the pictures that I’m wearing brown jeans, a flannel shirt, and steel-toed boots. I am now one step removed from overalls and a John Deere cap, aren’t I?

When we got near the back of the shed we made another discovery. Underneath the nearly impenetrable brush there was a huge pile of rotting railroad ties, old log fenceposts, corrugated tin, chunks of concrete, and half-buried cinderblocks. Thank God we have something that can move all that. The tractor’s usefulness grows each day.

200 pound railroad ties are no match for Bertha (I’m testing the name out).

All this stuff came from the area next to / behind the shed.

Once the land was mostly cleared, I hooked up the box blade and went to work. It took a few tries, but I got a decent swale cut after a bit. I used a shovel to smooth it out, and then turned on the water to see what would happen.

The results are definitely encouraging, but only a real rain is going to test it for me. While the water was running I noticed one other thing that needs to be addressed. The concrete is low outside the door to the shed, and there’s a slight pooling. Further, the doorway has no threshhold installed, so I’m betting when there’s a lot of rain part of that pool runs into the shed. I need to measure the doorway and figure out how to put a threshhold down.

I worked about 9 hours at the house yesterday, three inside and six outside. I’ll probably put in another eight or nine today.

All this work tires me out, and makes for some dark bags under my eyes.

On the upside, all I need to do in the remaining upstairs bedrooms is install the coves and molding, and paint all the trim. Then it’ll be time for more inside pictures.

Friday night when I was painting one of the spud’s closets in the Smallville house, something made a moaning sound out in the attic just beyond where I sat.

I didn’t poke my head out there to see what it was.

When it was time to leave, I gathered up the bucket of paintbrushes I had soaking in the bathroom, flipped the light switch to turn the lights off, and walked down the hallway to the top of the stairs.

And the bathroom light turned back on. The switch was completely in the up position.

In the first instance, Robyn was in another closet on the other side of the house. In the other, she was downstairs.

Yesterday afternoon I was alone in the house, finishing up the painting in that same closet in the spud’s room, when a sound started in the closet and went on for a couple of minutes. Whispering. That’s what it sounded like, someone whispering, but I couldn’t quite make out the words.

I ignored it, and again didn’t stick my head out there to see if anything was to be seen. I’ve seen enough movies to know better.

And a few minutes later, when something rapped sharply against the wall from another part of the attic, over by the chimney, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

This house has promise.

(note: I do not believe in ghosts or walking spirits, but I’d LOVE to be proven wrong. None of the sounds had the feel of intelligence or purpose about them, not even the knocking noise. Probably I heard a combination of traffic and old house sounds. Most likely, I didn’t flip the bathroom light switch completely into the off position. But still, I hope.)