absurdity

The huge storm a month ago left us with David Lynch-style power problems. Turning on the microwave made the lights dim. Running the air conditioning at the same time as the dryer caused a worse brownout. Those two coupled with the dishwasher caused damn near candlelight dimness in the house.

I finally called the power company and reported flickering lights. I accompanied the repairman to the back of the house, where he immediately noticed that the neighbor’s ridiculously overhanging tree had severed our neutral power wire. He hacked off some branches and hooked us back up.

In the process, I noticed that our fence was split in the corner, on the same neighbor’s side of the house. Since our dogs have the free run of the yard, this needed to be immediately corrected. E walked around to the neighbor’s side of the fence. This weirdo has had enormous street light poles on his side of the fence for as long as we’ve lived here. Though they were disgusting to look at, c’est la vie. When we looked at the poles from his side of the fence, they were not only freestanding and not screwed into the ground, they were secured with wire to our fence posts. The weight of the poles over time had finally yanked our fence apart.

We were fuming, and fought with this guy to have this stuff immediately corrected. I screwed a two by four to the side of the fence that was split and secured it quite well. In the meantime, the guy took down the street light posts, and despite our insistence that he use our lawn guy for the tree trimming, decided to trim the thing himself.

Everything has been corrected and our power has been restored, but I’ve never seen anything more terrifying than our neighbor standing on the very top of an extension ladder dangling between thick power lines trying to cut tree branches with a Sawzall.