Y' dig sixteen tons...

Saturday, my neighbor to the west and I got together and tore down the fence between our properties. It had been ready to collapse for months, and we discovered that the wood at the base, where it joined its concrete foot, had completely rotted. So we split the cost, rented a post-hole digger, and labored throughout the day to put in three new fence posts. It was a lot of fun despite all the digging, and I had my iPod playing folk music and other stuff throughout the day. The neighbor has a lot of boys, although only two of them seemed interested in helping out.

Why is it, though, that the neighborhood kids all seem to think my house is suitable for play? The downstairs is a wreck; at one point there were seven children in my house yesterday. Fortunately, we didn't have to feed them. And I much prefer the kids from the west, who refer to me as "Mr. Sternberg," over the ones on the east side, the ferals, who just say "Hey, Elf!" all the time.

And the littlest girl over at the ferals has a burn on her ankle. Big one, from a firework going off-course and hitting her there. (I should photograph the enormous bundle of firework leftovers they have piled around their trashcan-- there must be a thousand dollars in boom right there.) I was pleased to see that when their father came over to visit them, he at least bothered to cover it, even if he did have to borrow some medical tape from us to finish the job.

I also replaced the scent bundles in the wasp traps. There were a lot of wasps out yesterday; let's hope that I get a lot of them today in the traps. Very Vincent Price of me, without the accompanying spray of atomized wasp parts into the surrounding atmosphere.