When I bought my condo five years ago I got suckered into being on the board of the HOA, and I haven’t managed to get off of it since. To be fair, the perks are equivalent to the annoyances (most of the time) and being the control freak that I am, I like to have a finger on the pulse as regards the community in which I reside, so it could be worse.
The HOA has been slowly going through each unit and replacing either the unit in question’s balcony or patio fence, obviously depending upon whether the unit is a ground-floor or upper-floor unit. We’ve been doing the balconies first, obviously, because the potential for death and destruction is far greater, but we’ve now finished the balconies that were in ‘critical condition’ and are moving on to the patio fences.
I have a patio fence. It has been in not-great shape since I bought my unit. Its initial not-great shape has deteriorated over time, and it is now on its last legs. It’s got flapping boards and dry rot and the whole enchilada. I keep waiting for it to do something out of a cartoon, like the whole bottom foot to just crumble and the remainder of the fence to shift down in one whole piece and suddenly instead of a six-foot fence I have a five-foot fence. (This is highly comical in my head. Not sure how well it translates to anyone else’s head…)
The Great Fence Replacement of 2019 is scheduled to take place sometime during the next two weeks. The company doing the replacements is doing several in the community, and because you never know what’s going to happen when you start pulling things down and putting new ones up, they don’t publish an official schedule in case everything goes to shit on one unit and puts them behind. That being said, I had to have my patio and fence clear/consolidated before the scheduled two weeks so that whenever the workers get to my place, they can get on with things with a minimum of fuss. Not really a huge problem, and a completely realistic expectation.
Except I kiiinda hadn’t done my leaves for...well, a while, anyway.
There is a large Black Oak in the courtyard of my building. Every autumn, it drops its leaves. A great number of them fall into my patio. I am a lazy so-and-so, and only properly get rid of them ‘every so often’, which can mean once a year, once every other year, once every two years...you get the idea. So there were a lot of leaves to be dealt with. Also some rather dusty patio furniture, a whole heck of a lot of succulents in various pots, a bunch of unused pots, and other general patio detritus you would expect.
And dust and pollen. Lots and lots of dust and pollen.
Honestly, I was going to do a half-assed job and just sort of smoosh everything inwards onto the pavers, but somehow I managed to call up the energy to do things properly, and now my patio (though still dusty, there’s only so much one can do about that,) looks much more like a patio (albeit one waiting to have its fence re-done) than a leaf commune.
***If you were waiting for it, here’s the part with the creepy-crawlies.***
The thing about leaf communes is that they attract a whole ecosystem of critters. I don’t even want to think about how many spiders I displaced, squished (accidentally), or ::shudders:: touched (even through garden gloves) during the couple of hours it took me to sort through that mess. (My rule on spiders is this: if they’re outside, they are allowed to live. If they come into my house, they go squish. BUH-BYE.) I am purposely not looking up ‘common California spiders’ and pretending that every one I saw was a harmless, common garden spider of some sort and not, in fact, something that could have killed me.
Nope. Not even gonna check. No, thank you. Nuh-uh. Absitively, posilutely not.
Anyway, toward the end of this chore, when I was bagging up the leaves to be taken away, I disturbed a rat snake. To be fair, it’s not like he couldn’t have known I was coming, what with all the ruckus I was making, but nevertheless, there he was, wriggling and startled and suddenly disoriented.
I felt kinda bad. But only kinda.
Honestly, at first I thought I had just uncovered a giant earthworm, but it became clear pretty quickly that, pinkish as it was, this was a scaly critter with a proper head. I shooed him out underneath another part of the fence, and that was that. And he wasn’t very big. Maybe a foot long, but skinny. Definitely a juvenile.
Moving along.
***If the creepy-crawlies section didn’t do it for you, this might. You have been warned.***
Three* of my now-departed ratties were buried in the dirt part of my patio, close to the fence. I say ‘were’, because I personally disinterred them yesterday.
Yeah. I know.
But here’s the thing; they were buried in a place where they were bound to be unearthed by the fence replacement, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of my sweet little loves being crushed and mixed up and possibly stuck in cement. So I gathered what I could of them and put them in labeled plastic baggies, and now I need to figure out how to get the bones clean so I can do something artsy with them. I may end up just doing their skulls rather than their skulls and whatever else I managed to get hold of, but we’ll cross that bridge when we have the plans.
*The fourth, Gabby Rat, was cremated, because she was the only one of the four of them who was euthanized at the regular vet. Everyone else went to the emergency vet, and they give you the option to take them home.
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