I thought I had written, mostly to myself, a previous post about the things that had gone wrong at our house in the last couple of years. Maybe it is blended in with other posts and I just can't find it right now.
Though nothing would seem to be able to match the Virginia Beach summer from a couple of years ago when there was a plate like object in the city sewer which would periodically, but most spectacularly during Stevenson Week, block the out flow of the sewer and lead to flooding of the basement bathroom, the furnace room and the children's TV room, maybe the cumulative impact of the last 3 months' events in Richmond comes close.
Before things got really rolling, over the winter, because of my forgetting to disconnect the outside hose, we had a frozen and then burst pipe into the fit room. After we got that fixed, we had ants set up a nest inside the cable box. It was very convenient for them to have their home near a big plant we had in the room. It took some sleuthing and a lot of insect spray to sort that one out.
Then the summer got started- a storm in June shorted out the TV, internet, alarm system and phone while we were out of town. The city got hit harder than we did and it took a good three weeks, most of it on the phone with Verizon trying to convince them our service was out, to get Verizon to come and replace the burnt out parts. That still did not revive the TV which had suffered internal damage from the surge too.
A day or two after another storm, C and I were having dinner when we got a text message from Bobby next door to say he just watched a big tree fall into the pond next door.
My tree man Wayne, who has not had any idle time in the last year I think, found a break and took care of that and managed to remove the tree from the pond cleanly and without any driveway or walkway damage. I was amazed. It was a double or triple trunked tree and he said he needed to return to take care of the other part when he had the right equipment.
But before he could get back we had another huge storm (power out and trees down all over Stratford Hills to Bon Air) that toppled another tree - right now it is leaning on another tree, waiting for Wayne.
That same storm pushed into a significant leaning position one of the martin houses and BLEW AWAY my orange rowing shell. The wind was strong enough under the shell to break the fore and aft knots holding it down. The shell is probably on its way to Jamestown now. (Actually as I edit this, I just retrieved the shell UPRIVER from where it got blown off the dock; it is totally broken.)
I am only writing this in draft for now just as a way of warding off further damages this year.
That sentence didn't work. The TV guys came to do the one last repair from the June storm and found the fios box and the replacement control box didn't work so we have to make another appointment.
And the ants came back in force, inside and out.
Trying the draft idea again.
That didn't work either. The tree guy came to take down the one by the pond and the leaning locust. He got them down ok but could not grind the stump of the locust because the sprinkler zone in the area was running for at least hours and the ground was soaked.
I checked the valve settings and set those zones to 0 minutes to let the ground dry out so he can come back for the grinding. This morning one zone I had set to 0 was running- when I checked it, it had set itself for 12 hours.
Further the kitchen freezer door which was not sealing correctly and thus icing inside, and which we repaired a month ago for some big $, is icing again. And Connie found another palmetto bug in the kitchen.
It is now September and the TV system is back to full force, and the refrigerator has gone back to its old ways. But this all pales to John D's fire at the Arc which has me grieving.
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