Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Roof! Roof!

It's noisy in Cattown this week. Two of my neighbors are getting new roofs. Yesterday the crew arrived at 8 a.m. (better than 7 a.m., anyway) to begin taking off the old slate roof of my neighbor's house across the street. I know she was really proud of that old slate roof -- they don't make 'em like that anymore -- and sorry to see it go. But the slate roof on my house had to be replaced 40 years ago after Hurricane Betsy took most of it off, so my neighbor got 40 more years out of hers than my family got out of its slate.

And slate makes a LOT of noise when you are throwing it off the roof. There is a dumpster out on the street where they are throwing the roofing materials. Ah, dumpsters. When we were renovating the downstairs of my house two years ago, we took out plaster in seven rooms, including the walls of two staircases. We filled THREE dumpsters. And let me tell you, no matter who is paying for a dumpster, it is public property. I still would like to know who threw the sofa in mine. I know one of my neighbors was landscaping his front yard at the time, and he took the opportunity to hurl dirt and pieces of concrete into "my" dumpster. It was a no-brainer to figure out who did that; they were in his yard one day and in the dumpster the next.

I have a huge pile of trash in front of my house that has been accumulating since October. It started out as the remains of my alligator pear (aka avocado) tree that keeled over during the storm, fortunately in a direction away from the house, plus my neighbor's attic turbine that landed in my yard. It now includes a fig tree that keeled over (with a little help from the termites in its trunk), a box spring and mattress, and a lot of junque from the house. I keep hoping the city will come one day and pick it up. They are slowly picking up trash in the area, but the order in which they are doing it remains an arcane mystery. But in the meantime, until they do, there is that nice dumpster...

Naah. I am in no mood to pick up a mattress, much less all those tree limbs. But it is a temptation.

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