Zillow.com lets another $2819 out of the price tag here at the palatial Surlywood estate; the Zestimate, once pushing $120,000 for no discernible reason, is now down to $105,082.

At this rate, the numbers should be at least somewhat plausible in two or three weeks.

(Previous Zestimates recorded here.)

"It was turning into a hazard," he said, and I suppose it was awfully close to the power lines at that. So last week he brought out the chainsaw, with the results you see. (Click to embiggen.) Yesterday most of the detritus was hauled off. Admittedly, I have something of a reputation as a treehugger, so I wasn't exactly overjoyed at seeing it come down, but hey, it's their tree, and for all I know, clearing this space might actually help with the process of selling the house, which is presumably uppermost in their agenda right about now. Still, when something you've seen every day for three years disappears, it takes a while for the image to right itself in the brain and the correction factors to be applied. In another three years, I might well forget about it — until, of course, I browse the archives for something or other.

Friday I said something about a riding-mower incident, and therein I marveled that someone had kept one of these things running for thirty-six years.

I marvel more today, inasmuch as my two-and-a-half-year-old mower is now semi-handle-less, the bolt which used to hold the left side of the handle in place having disappeared into the yard somewhere — and worse, somewhere far away from the knob, which I did manage to find within ten minutes. You'd think something metallic, therefore presumably shiny, would show up easily in the sunlight, but no such luck.

So I went to Sears' Web site, and they have the knob, but not the bolt. I uttered a few unpleasantries, then called Sears' 800 number. For some reason, they have the bolt.

(Aside: In AOL chatrooms, when one person is in charge of dispatching evildoers and otherwise controlling the content, said person's screen name is displayed in the room list with a lightning icon; this person is said to "have the bolt." If you are banned from the room by this individual, you have been "bolted." This is not to be confused with being "nailed" or "screwed," though I am told this also happens on AOL.)

Reviling Sears is a popular pastime — I turned up 963 Google hits for "sears sucks" — but I've always been able to get parts from them, which is one reason, perhaps the only significant reason, why I continue to buy their stuff.

Zillow.com continues to tweak the database: the palatial estate at Surlywood now is just barely into six figures, at $100,221, down $4861 from the last report.

The likelihood that anyone is going to offer me a hundred grand for this place, of course, is extremely remote.

Unlike some, I got the room:

According to Oklahoma County data, the property unofficially known as Surlywood is a one-family house that covers 1,060 square feet, on a lot of 11,025 square feet.

By contemporary standards, that's a lot of lot. (It's also rather a lot to mow, but everything in life has trade-offs.)

Were you to make a list of Things That Just Don't Happen, I wouldn't at all be surprised if you included "insurance premium decreased," though in my three years at the palatial Surlywood estate, this actually did happen once.

Make that twice. Despite a four-percent increase in coverage (an inflation rider of some sort), insuring the little box on the curve will cost $100 less this coming year.

This being a mere eight bucks and change per month, I am going to use that sum to bump up the coverage another fourteen percent, splitting the difference between what the assessor thought the place was worth last year and what Zillow.com thought the place was worth last week (which is now a smidgen under $100k).

Taxes? I figure they'll go up $30 or so.

Well, nothing's eating my house, anyway: today was the annual Termite Inspection, and once again there were no traces of the ravenous little so-and-sos. (I would much rather write them a small check once a year than a huge one every once in a while.)

I note in passing that this is the second time this month I expected a job to go to a semi-grizzled guy not unlike myself which was actually filled by an efficient young woman. If this be a trend, I approve. (I don't expect one to displace me permanently until I retire / drop dead / face the firing squad [choose one], whenever that may be.)

No goblins this year, though someone felt compelled to call me on the landline at 5:46, 5:48 and 5:51 am, which I suppose qualifies as a trick: it certainly wasn't anything resembling a treat.

Incidentally, I must object to the characterization of these minimal packages as "Fun Size"; no way is there enough in any one of them to qualify as Fun.

The palatial Surlywood estate now carries a Zestimate of $93,730, which might even be reasonable. (I've been saying that somewhere in the middle 90s was plausible, more or less ever since they came up with the startling sum of $117,695 back in the summer, a figure which, I felt, couldn't possibly be justified.)

Not that I'm particularly upset; it's just a number, and I'm not planning to sell anyway. Others might take umbrage, and some actually have: the National Community Reinvestment Coalition has filed a complaint about Zillow.com with the Federal Trade Commission. Says NCRC:

Curbed.com's San Francisco blog finds this a trifle amusing:

I dunno. I've never met any dishonest appraisers, but obviously this doesn't mean that they don't exist. I suspect, though, that more people are using Zillow as a get-a-load-of-this site than as an actual valuation oracle. Certainly I've done my part to encourage this sort of thing.

And it's deep, too:

That lantern is on the northwest corner of my flower bed; it hangs just over the Wall O' Bricks that surrounds and defines the bed. (Those little green pointy things are the last vestiges of this year's irises.) And the ruler is buried up to just shy of the four-inch mark. Supposedly we're more than halfway through this mess, but you couldn't prove it by me.

This can be considered the reverse-angle shot to this one from yesterday afternoon, following a night of high winds and blowing snow. Temperature was a balmy 14 degrees Fahrenheit.

That slight bloom in the center is an artifact from the flash. (Sunrise was around 7:20, so it was still way dark when I shot this.) Not visible, off to the right, are the redbud trees and the strings of lights hung upon them, mostly because I thought it was a bad idea to run electrical stuff when the cord and the plug are under half a foot of concentrated wetness.

The camera, incidentally, is six months old.

Yes, this is actually in my house. (The seemingly inebriated bobby to the right will, if you press a coin into his hand, give out with a verse of "The Little Drummer Boy." And also if you don't, since he's too besotted to notice.) I'm thinking maybe I might be better served with a Festivus pole next year.

Seen at Surlywood while the sun tucked itself into a cloud: two Glee-Girls (not even slightly to be confused with Glea-Girls), yours truly, and a Big Swirling Ball of Light.

Sean Gleeson documents the scene. (And his lovely wife Phoebe can make a darn nice sugar cookie.)

I woke up this morning at a wretched hour, noted that there'd been about a quarter-inch of rain, and decided that this, by Freya's bodice, would be the day I would get around to doing something about the front lawn. There had been no sign of greening, except where patches of horrid weedage were poking their way through, and, well, the first words on the back of a sack of Turf Teaser, or whatever the hell it's called, are FOR BEST RESULTS APPLY TO WET LAWN.

So I went back to sleep for an hour or two, remembered my pledge, duly rolled out the El Cheapo spreader, which has two settings (Not Enough and Overkill), dumped about 10 kg of the mystery crystals into its box, and ventured forth.

Not a wise decision. For where there is neither grass nor weed, rather a lot of area inasmuch as the old elm out front tends to suck up all the available moisture and we've been running about an inch below normal rainfall this year, there is a phenomenon called Mud, and we're talking industrial-strength, sink-up-to-here, spawn of Harcourt Fenton-type mud. Add to this one further brilliant idea — "It's not cold out, and it will be easier to clean up if I wear the ol' sport sandals" — and, well, were there any Bigfoot sightings in the neighborhood, 'twas probably I.

Had I bothered to go back to the weather statistics, I might actually have seen that that quarter-inch of rain had tripled between initial decision and actual action.

Another house on my street is being offered for sale. The owners live in Edmond, and have leased the place out for the last three years or so; perhaps they're tired of playing landlord.

Description, from when it was first offered for rent:

The claimed size is now 1569 square feet; I think it's closer to 1500, but I haven't been inside with a tape measure, so don't take my word for it. (The Assessor says 1075, but I don't think he's figuring the garage conversion into the total.) The place was seriously remodeled in 2002, and still looked pretty good the last time I was over there. A quarter of a bathroom has apparently vanished: they now claim 1¾.

Asking price is $95,000. The Assessor's notice this year says the place is worth $104,461; Zillow's Zestimate is $104,353. Property taxes run a little over a thousand a year. (I'll have some tax talk later, inasmuch as I just got my own notice.)

First, a reprint from 2005:

For this year, read 9.19 and 4.999 percent.

You might think — and you would be correct — that the longer a property remains under the cap, the greater the disparity between the market value and the taxable market value. This year, the difference is about 9.4 percent.

The actual tax rate, which is not subject to the cap, will be determined in the fall; last year it went up 0.84 percent.

To borrow a phrase, I fought the lawn, and the lawn won. It is my policy to have neither the best lawn on the block nor the worst, but I've dropped too close for comfort to the low end of the scale, and while the leading (trailing?) contenders have just enough physical proximity to make me look slightly better, I can't count on this continuing, especially with changes in ownership in the offing.

It was therefore clearly time to call for reinforcements, so I dialed up a vendor, and was presented the next day with an audit of what they'd found.

The lawn was characterized as "fair," in the sense that you would characterize the Antarctic as "cool." They consider eleven weed types to be controllable; I had five of them. Of ten potential lawn diseases, three were recognized. On the upside, I had acceptable thatch, and truly, how many of us can say that?

This is, I must point out, not my first choice for a counterattack. There are small creatures in the neighborhood, a legitimate cause for concern, and all else being equal, I'd rather be dealing out mass quantities of something that is less likely to be hazardous to their little systems. But that's for later, after the Unwanted Botanicals are under control; right now, I need something strong enough to take down low-flying aircraft.

(Oh, and while this should be obvious, it somehow didn't occur to me: price quotes tend to be based on the dimensions of the areas to be treated — typically, 5000 square feet. This will not work well at Surlywood, where the back yard alone is nearly 6000 square feet. No wonder it takes so long to mow.)

You're watching an old Warner Bros. crime drama at about 1:30 in the morning, and inevitably, there is a scene where one of the cops, the sort of guy you see playing NFL nose guard these days, puts his best shoulder into play and one, two, three, busts through the door. And you say to your significant other, nodding off behind the Chee-tos, "I don't believe that's possible."

I am here to tell you that it is.

The garage (one-car) at the palatial Surlywood estate measures, according to the authorities, 290 square feet.

I mention that in case you felt like looking at this.

Admittedly, my garage does not look particularly comfy.

Well, sort of. NW 50th west of Pennsylvania is flooded to a depth of half a foot, maybe more; it improves a bit once you reach Villa, but there are still lots of stranded cars.

I figured I'd get no stray water up here at Surlywood. I was in error, although only slightly: the water on the patio was high enough to seep into the garage, so I have a rather damp stretch of carpet along the north end, which isn't going to dry any time soon. Fortunately, once into the garage, gravity demands that the liquid head southward, under the door and down the driveway, so it's not going to accumulate. Much.

Other than that, it's been a rotten day.

Addendum, 10 pm: Weather records here go back to 1891, and not once has there been a March day with this much rain — until now.

One of the things that drew me to this particular block of town is its asymmetry: there are 11 houses on the block, four on the north side, seven on the south.

The imbalance extends to actual home sales as well: since I arrived here in the fall of '03, there have been three sales on the south side and two on the north — but those two were on the same house, a year apart. This was the home at the east end (I'm at the west end). Both houses in between are now up for sale. I've mentioned one of them before, so it seems I should make some announcement of the other.

This FSBO is advertised as 1400 square feet (the Assessor confirms). It's actually on a similar floor plan to mine, but where I have an actual garage, they chose to build additional living space. Three bedrooms, a bath and three-quarters, CH&A, all that good stuff. It's offered as is, buyer to pay closing. Price is $87,900; the Assessor values it at just into six figures; Zillow's whatever-it-is comes to $99,471.

The weird aspect of all this, at least to me, is that once these properties are sold, I, with my 3½-year tenure, become the Old Man of the Block. The north side of it, anyway.

Update, 5:50 pm: The For Sale sign next door (not the house described today) has been replaced with a For Rent sign. Evidently they've had a change of heart or something.

Two shots from within my flower box. Above, the irises rise to meet the sun (though the stiff winds today haven't helped that much); below, one not-quite-perfect (but still pretty nice) rose, far darker than the pink ones I usually get. (The backyard rosebush produces flowers the color of ketchup, and I mean Heinz.)

I cranked up the A/C yesterday around 7 pm, not so much because it was necessary (it was still only 77 degrees in the house, about the same outside, and I was, um, equipped for maximum cool) but because I wanted to make sure that the apparatus was working correctly before the Real Heat™ kicks in later this spring.

At some point thereafter it occurred to me that this might be the latest First Air Conditioning event ever; it's not something I take note of every year, but here are a handful of prior-year references:

Be it noted that all of these events precede the November 2003 acquisition of the palatial Surlywood estate, whose current A/C system was installed circa 1997, and which was last serviced in July 2006.

The sweetgum tree-to-be in the back yard of the palatial Surlywood estate, rising from the remains of a tree that blew over in one of those legendary Oklahoma storms, survived the winter quite nicely, thank you very much, and while it hasn't added a whole lot of height, it's built up quite an infrastructure in its eleven months of life; certainly it's doing better than the grass that has still failed to grow back in the area directly beneath its predecessor. (Said predecessor was more or less centered in that ungrassed circle, the base of its trunk taking up approximately three-quarters of the area.) Unofficially, it's a shade (sorry) over twenty-seven inches tall, which means it's growing slower than bamboo but faster than the national debt. The tree obviously is a long way from being mature, but then again, people have said that about me, and I've been around for a whole lot longer than eleven months. Regular readers will remember that I took the loss very badly when it happened — residual treehugger instincts, I suppose — so I consider the rebirth, as it were, something to celebrate in a small way, especially since my new mowing regime puts the blades well above those damned spiky balls emitted by that second sweetgum five feet to the east.

I made some noises last spring about trying out compact-fluorescent bulbs, and in the interim I've installed six of them: two in the bedroom (one in each lamp), two in the kitchen (over the sink), and two in the garage. I don't know how well they perform under really adverse conditions, such as below-freezing conditions, since this isn't, God willing, going to happen in the house, and the garage has never gotten below about 34 degrees no matter how cold it was outside, but there have been no failures so far, and as I noted in February, after mounting the last pair, my primary motivation is "the desire to avoid changing bulbs so damned often." Since lifespan is not always consistent on these things, at least not yet, I figure I'm either not working them too hard or I'm having better luck than some folks.

I'm downright awash in roses this spring for some reason; there's a fourth rosebush in Ye Olde Flower Box hiding among the irises, and it's producing nice pink blooms. This isn't one of them; it's from the plant just to the north, where it was easier to get a shot, but the general appearance is about the same.

I'd mentioned before that there was a rosebush in the back yard. I gave it no attention for two and a half years; last fall I trimmed it back to about 54 inches in height and reshaped it somewhat. (Its width is ultimately limited by the evergreen right next to it.) This is what I got for my trouble:

This compensates for the blah year I'm having on the iris front.

Actually, I got rather a lot done today, terrain-wise, considering the stiff winds and all. After finishing up, I hit the shower, got dressed, and dragged myself off to the grocery store, and to prove that timing is everything, approximately two minutes after I'd left, the Yard Guys came by and punched several hundred holes in the topsoil. Just as well. And the rain started up later this afternoon, so we'll see if any additional moisture makes it down to where the roots are. They noted a heck of a lot of crabgrass; on the other hand, last time they were here, of the eleven "controllable" weeds on their list, I had five of them, so evidently four are more or less under control. And I've noticed that some of the bare spots out front, among my chief sources of despair, are indeed starting to fill in around the edges.

It dawned on me while pushing the mower that I probably overpaid for the darn thing, not so much for its Honda-sourced engine but for its front-wheel drive, which I think I've used once this year: most of the time I leave the drive disengaged and just push, even uphill. On the upside, it's still running in its fourth year, which, given the way I tend to treat mowers, is sort of remarkable. It is, however, on its second blade, and twice it's tried to throw a wheel. (The wheel is attached to the height adjustment, which in turn is bolted to the frame; this bolt doesn't like to stay as tight as I'd prefer. It's always the same wheel: left rear.) And it's taking very kindly to the three-dollar-and-odd premium gasoline it's getting, as it damned well ought to be, if you ask me.

Your lawn? "An irrational consumer preference," says Zack Wendling:

Believe me, I know the costs. It's about a buck and a half worth of gas every week, plus $300-500 a year for the weed-control regimen, plus a whole lot of time, plus whatever I spent on the tools of the trade. And I do as little maintenance as I can get away with, if only to avoid the appearance of suburban sterility.

And while my front yard is mostly for show — which is a tragedy, because it doesn't look so wonderful — the back yard does get used, for sunning and (gag) occasional exercise.

Still, I have a thousand-square-foot house sitting on a quarter-acre-plus lot. I do not envision ever having the same thousand-square-foot house sitting on a quarter-acre-plus parking lot: to me, that's low status.

There was real live sun this afternoon, something there hasn't been a lot of lately, so I spread a blanket on the grass and did a brief Vitamin D-gathering session, the chores actually having been completed for once.

About three minutes into my semi-slumber came a cry from the north: "Oh, my God!" Sounded like a twelve-year-old. I've heard it before, but I've not been inclined to check out its origin. Still, there's something disconcerting about this sort of expostulation, even though it was fairly unlikely (though not completely impossible) that I had motivated it by my resemblance to an albino walrus.

So I had to listen to the entire conversation, which turned out to be older child threatening younger child with something along the lines of "Wait until Mom sees this mess!" Mom did eventually enter the thread, and she was not pleased. Or so it seemed; after a couple of sentences, the hitherto-unheard sound of a lawn mower next door drowned her out, and eventually I stretched, pulled a few weeds within easy reach, folded up my blanket (not especially neatly) and went back into the house to scrape up something for dinner.

What with twenty-nine inches of rain so far this year (more than all of last year), I figure if there's anything living under my yard, it's got to be mildew. But no, say the Lawn Guys, it's grubs, and they can leave horrible-looking burned spots on the areas that aren't presently completely and utterly drenched.

So I put in for a de-grubbing, which sounds like even less fun than I think it is. Let's hope they're heavy on the 30-weight.

(Because you're thinking it already: "Don't eat with your hands, son. Use your entrenching tool.")

It wasn't deliberate, exactly, but the result was the same.

There was a period of about four hours today when it actually wasn't raining, so I figured I'd see if I could tame the jungle that had been growing in the front yard for the better part of two weeks. The mower complained; I pressed ahead. Finally, after finishing about ¾ of the job, I looked down and noticed a nasty hemorrhage spreading across the deck.

This is not the first time I've seen oil out of place on this mower: lately every few minutes or so a smidgen of it would blow out the exhaust, which tells me that (1) the valve guides are probably shot and (2) it would cost more than this thing is worth to fix it.

So if you were wondering what I'm doing for the Fourth of July, wonder no more.

I have to figure that neither S. Duncan Black nor Alonzo G. Decker ever imagined that their company would be selling something like this: it resembles an electric drill (which Messrs. B and D invented ninety-odd years ago) in no way except for the fact that it has a power cord.

Still, one of these LawnHogs will be taking up residence at the palatial Surlywood estate as soon as Amazon.com can get it on a truck and into my hot (okay, tepid) little hands. Lowe's Web site has it for the same price, but Amazon was giving away free shipping, and they claimed to have it in stock; Lowe's won't tell you if they have any on hand until you actually push the Add to Cart button. Besides, this gives me more than enough reward points on Amazon's Visa to get me a $25 gift certificate.

Yes, I have an extension cord. There's a GFCI-equipped outlet on the front of the house, another just inside the garage, so I'll have a place to plug in the beast. And I'm sure I can find a use for the approximately 1.2 gallons of gasoline that won't be going into the old mower.

It seemed improbable, but there it was on the water bill: PLACE BULKY AT CURB BY 6AM (WED) 07/04/07. The first Wednesday of the month is our usual day for Bulky Waste pickup, so that wasn't a big deal, but it's the Fourth of July, fercryingoutloud.

So yesterday afternoon I wheeled the old lawn mower to the curb and folded down its handle, lest anyone think I was just taking a break, hoping the city would pick it up in the morning. I needn't have worried: it's not 6 am yet, and already someone has hauled it away.

The new one, says Amazon, has been shipped.

Well, the mower arrived yesterday, and by the time I got it home (thank you, Trini) the rain was coming down half-fast and semi-furious, so it stayed in its cardboard box.

Today there were traces of solar radiation, so I performed the ritual unboxing and stretched out the extension cord. Initial findings in the front yard:

• The 12-amp motor is just about as powerful — or, depending on your point of view, just about as unpowerful — as the 6.5-hp gas motor that committed suicide last week.
  
• The 19-inch swath is narrower than I'm used to, and where the stuff is really thick it takes two passes.
  
• The machine weighs practically nothing, and by nothing I mean a hair over 50 lb, barely half the mass of its predecessor, so its lack of self-propulsion is no big deal.
  
• This is the first time in my life I ever wished I had a skyhook at my disposal.
  

I think I could get used to this pretty easily, once I figure out a reliable system for keeping the cord out of my way.

The guy who bought the house across the street has reconfigured it: instead of three smallish bedrooms, it now has two bigger bedrooms with walk-in closets. Which might not be a bad idea, since there are relatively few families with children in this part of town: we have singles, young couples and empty-nesters, but Ward and June and the boys moved out to the 'burbs years ago.

Anyway, the list of improvements, as posted in his information tube, is substantial, and while I haven't seen the interior, the exterior is definitely spruced up. Still to be answered: whether a two-bedroom, 1300-square-foot house on an 8300-square-foot lot is more salable at the $130k price point than a two-bedroom, 1300-square-foot condominium. I figure if it sells for that price, it's worth $5-10k to me just for being in the neighborhood.

After a week of no rain — something that hasn't happened since early March — I hauled out the sprinkler for the first time this year and gave the front yard an actual watering. And, as often happens with unusual events, there was some unusual fallout.

A band of youngsters, seven or eight of them, the youngest maybe nine years old, was walking up the street on this hot (high today was 95) afternoon while I was digging a few holes in the flower bed. They didn't see me, but they did see the sprinkler, and the absence of a sidewalk notwithstanding, they adjusted their path to make sure they got under at least one sweep.

As the last of them was getting a shower, I suddenly appeared from behind a shrub with a pair of hedge shears, the AK-47 of hand-operated gardening tools, and for one brief moment, there was palpable (if soggy) tension in the air as they waited for me to tell them to get off my damn lawn. I said nothing, and finally one of them yelled what could have been a "Thank you." It seemed reasonable to let it go at that.

Meanwhile, there was an audible screech from the big elm tree out front, and it didn't take long to determine its source: a bird who had taken up temporary sanctuary in the tree was apparently disturbed by these jets of water, perhaps because they were coming from the wrong direction. (Rain falls down, right?) With plenty of feather-ruffling, he darted from one set of branches to another, back and forth, shaking off the water and giving out with another screech about every third dart. This was, of course, impossible to photograph, since the bird was moving at high speed and water was slicing through the area almost as quickly, but I did manage to get off one halfway-decent shot, in which the irritation seems plainly visible on the bird's countenance: that beak, I'd bet, would be digging into my shoulder blades if he'd had his way. He continued to complain until I'd called off the deluge and reeled in the hose.

There's been enough stormage today to keep the temperature at an un-August-like seventy-five, so when I got back from an impromptu shopping trip this evening and noticed that traces of dinner lingered in the kitchen atmosphere — mostly not-so-great BBQ sauce — I popped open a bunch of windows and cranked up the attic fan.

Not such a brilliant idea. The indoor temperature didn't budge, but all the moisture from outside (well, a lot of it) got sucked into the house: in ten minutes the relative humidity, according to my cute little wall-mounted readout device, had risen from a modest 50 percent to nearly 80.

I shut the windows and restarted the A/C. There are some things up with which I will not put.

And not all that effed up, either.

Power was apparently restored at 7:30 this morning, though I'd already left for work and wouldn't have noticed it. I did try calling the house, and the machine picked up, but I vaguely recall that there's a battery backup for it. Also still running: alarm clock. Both TV sets retained all their settings; the VCR lost its time but nothing else. The cordless phone and the clocks in the kitchen appliances (range, microwave) were hors de combat.

On the matter of the garage door: I did manage to get the door and the opener reunited, and it felt so good — until I noticed that I'd knocked a wheel off the track. Having already bruised a thumb today, I wasn't going to arm-wrestle the thing back into position, so I called in an Expert, on the honorable basis that I should have called him a few months ago for routine maintenance anyway and it was therefore overdue and paying him after-hours charges would serve as a reminder in the future. (Tip of the beak to our man from Aaron's Garage Door Company, who not only got here fifteen minutes before the time promised, but who adjusted most of the noises out of the mechanism in the process.)

I figured the freezer stuff was okay. I pitched the following items from the fridge:

• Two pounds of ground beef (82/18)
  
• ½ jar of Prego pasta sauce (traditional)
  
• ¼ bottle of Pace taco sauce (medium)
  
• 1 box of J. C. Potter's sausage biscuits (6 count)
  

Fortunately, trash pickup is tomorrow morning.

There's one more chapter in the story of the Grating Blackout of 2007, and it began last night around dinnertime when I counted the bars on the cell phone, found them insufficient, and went looking for the charging device, which was not in its usual place.

This being the very same charger I'd used last night at the hotel, I retraced my unpacking steps, but found nothing. In desperation, I called the hotel. "Yes, housekeeping has turned one in," said the desk clerk, and I offered a description. No match. Oh, well.

"You'd be surprised how often this happens," said the clerk. "We have a whole boxful of chargers; bring your phone up and let's see if we can find one that works."

He wasn't kidding. There were literally dozens of phone chargers in the box, each sealed in a tiny Ziploc bag. I spotted one that looked like it might work, he found an outlet behind the counter, and "We have a winner."

To the lovely lady behind me at the counter: Yes, I am always this dorky.

I mowed the back yard Wednesday night, and yesterday afternoon it was already about twenty percent beyond Easy Cutting Height, which is defined as "tall enough to require me to run the electric mower at less than my preferred pace."

If we get the promised rain this week, I may have to spend Saturday or Sunday doing it again. Sheesh. Isn't August the time an Oklahoma lawn is supposed to give up for the year?

"Oh, yeah?" I hear you ask. "New neighbor with disdain for clothing? High-definition smut? An actual, God help us, girlfriend?"

None of the above. What I have is a massive gas leak in the back yard, and the flow has been shut off pending replacement of the line.

How massive? This past month's gas consumption was 5.6 dekatherms. That's a December kind of number. This time last year, consumption was about 1.0. If nothing else, this explains the humongous-for-summer gas bills, which I attributed to, well, all those extra showers made necessary by a plethora of yard work — until I reviewed the water bills, which had not gone up despite actual sprinkler use.

So I'm out mowing the back yard, and the stuff (actually, the stuff they put in it so you can smell it) hits me square in the face. I call the gas company, and they dispatched a chap who duly traced a direct path from the meter to the house and found no trace of gas. "It wasn't along there that I smelled it," I insisted, and eventually the truth of the matter was discovered: the gas line isn't where your geometry teacher would have put it, but dog-legged like the 12th hole at Southern Hills, if nowhere near as long.

Next step: they dig up the old line, install a new one. (I have been told that the gas meter will be relocated closer to the house.) How long this will take is anybody's guess, so until then: cold showers.

Wednesday went by with no change in the level of gaslessness around here. The way things are set up in this state, before you go digging around utilities, you Call Okie and get all the lines marked off, which makes sense. Today the sewer line was marked; presumably the water and gas lines will be marked tomorrow. (I talked to a Call Okie rep; he said they have generally 48 hours from the initial dispatch to get everything in place, but it's possible that things might hang until Monday.)

So I still have no idea when the gas will be back on, and ONG's customer-service interface blows serious chunks is on the inscrutable side; if you call them and try to bypass the endless voice-response prompts by dialing 0, you are advised by the robot voice that your selection is invalid. Probably the best I can hope for, at this point, is that someone at corporate is in the habit of looking at Technorati tags that read "Oklahoma Natural Gas" or "ONG."

Because who wants old gas?

The rest of the striping was done today, so now the palatial Surlywood estate is festooned with multicolored flags: green for the sewer line, blue for the water line, yellow for the gas line. (There are eight colors in all, but the rest don't apply here: both electric and cable lines are overhead.)

Still no word on when they're going to dig up the yard, but at least now they know where they're going to dig up the yard.

So I can go take a freaking shower.

The beginning of fall, says the calendar, is less than a week away, and I've lived here long enough to know that the first freeze will be well before the end of fall.

But just the same, staring at me from the west end of the flower box:

(Larger version is a click away.) I've been a little more diligent than usual in keeping the bushes trimmed back, and maybe this is the payoff.

Traditionally, weekends are made for yard work, but there's a lot to be said for getting it done during the work week, especially if you have attacks of Major Laziness come Saturday, as I generally do. And I've discovered that unless the workday has been unusually heinous, I can get home from the salt mine and go full tilt, or at least ¾ tilt, for about an hour before either the brain or the body tries to shut down on me.

So today I decided to attack the shrubs up front, while they're still worthy of the name "shrub." (The yaupon that sits in front of my bedroom window is probably past this status: it's now over ten feet tall.) Normally I prefer to do this in February or March, but the growth this year has been explosive — fifty inches of rainfall will do that — and I didn't take off so much that they'll suffer in the winter. And instead of bringing out the electricals, I did the reshaping by hand, which didn't take that much longer.

During the cleanup stage, a neighborhood kid, maybe six or seven, appeared in the driveway, as he's done before, looking for odd jobs to help fill his pockets. (Been there, done that.) I didn't have much left for him to do, and didn't have much to pay him with anyway. While I was trying to turn him away, he caught sight of the stubborn roses, now numbering in the teens, and expressed what sounded like delight, what with actual flowers still to be seen in this neck of the woods this late in the year. I said, half in jest, "You want some?"

He did.

So I brought out some suitable tools, and he made off with not quite a dozen of my finest pinks, which I suggested he might offer to his girlfriend. Actually, I suspect he's going to present them to his mom, about 1.5 seconds after she asks "And just where have you been?"

A local real-estate company puts out a monthly throwaway which shows up at the supermarket, and I grab one every now and then to see what's happening. The cover shows a "Stately Stonemill Estate," and here's the proffered description:

Wait a minute. Hornet family? The agent's two-page spread features three commendations, two from Chesapeake executives — and one from Hornets coach Byron Scott and his wife Anita. Could this have been Byron Scott's Oklahoma home?

After exercising a bit of Search Fu, I arrived at the truth of the matter: yes, it was. Here's the house, and the Assessor confirms the ownership. (And 73131, incidentally, is an Oklahoma City, not an Edmond, ZIP code.) I suppose it would be bad form to hold this place open for the next NBA coach to live here.

Somewhat lower on the food chain, the house across the street from me has been blessed with a ten-grand price cut, to $119,500. The new flyer says "To fully appreciate this home, you must see the inside," which seems fair, since the outside is neat and clean but doesn't scream "Buy me!" Up the street, another house has remained unsold for five months at $87,900. I can't help but think they'll budge eventually: this market is not in the sort of dire straits you see on the national news, but it's not exactly flourishing either.

These examples of Rosa recalcitransia are even now blooming in my flower box, one-quarter of the way through October fercrissake, and less than two weeks after one of the neighborhood kids got the best of the bunch. There has been rain, though not a lot, and I haven't watered them otherwise, feeling that geez, guys, it's time to hibernate, isn't it? And it's just this one bush: the others, while they continue to stretch their stems, aren't putting forth any new buds. (Click here or on the photo to embiggen.) This not-having-a-girlfriend business may backfire on me yet.

The gas bill has come in, and it's slightly less than half the size of the September bill; twiddling the figures, I've guesstimated that 100 cubic feet of natural gas escaped from my back yard every 24 hours for most of the summer. The greenhouse effect is probably minimal, but come first snow I'm probably going to complain that it wasn't minimal enough.

And I have to figure that since methane is lighter than air, it rose rather quickly; certainly it didn't hang around long enough to kill my lawn.

I mowed the back yard last night; I hope this is the last time I have to do it this year, inasmuch as it's October and all.

The County Assessor's Web site lists nine comps for my house, based on the following criteria:

I'm surprised they came up with as many as nine. All these are within two or three blocks, built in '47 or '48 as "Ranch 1 Story," and run 950 to 1220 square feet. The price range, however, is considerable: at the low end, $60.84 per square foot (readers in New York may pause here to reposition their jaws), rising to $85.55 at the top. My place comes in at $83.85, which would be good for second place had the last sale been within three years.

Incidentally, the new property-tax rates are due out Real Soon Now. If they don't go up, I'm facing a bill of $872 or so. If they go up to the level that prevailed in 2002, the highest on record in this particular district — yes, Virginia, the tax rates do occasionally trend downward — I'm looking at $900. Of course, Escrow T. Robot will take care of the check-writing detail and tweak the monthly payment as needed next spring.

I still have roses. I've decided to leave them there and see how long it takes for them to drop off.

From around this time last year:

I decided at the time to use the $100 difference to boost coverages on the house, rather than to reduce the outflow from the escrow account, putting last year's policy at roughly the same price I'd paid the year before.

Now comes this year's policy, which is about $25 less. Inasmuch as there are only two states where homeowner's insurance costs more than it does here, I consider myself fortunate indeed. Then again, I am generally disinclined to do things like, oh, get stinking drunk and burn the place to the ground, which no doubt helps keep the premium in check.

If this pattern holds, someday I might actually be able to afford to live here. And I expect it to hold for about two more weeks, when the property-tax bills come out.

I first saw it last week: transparent, not-too-viscous liquid, a little puddle on top of the dryer. I wiped it up, washed the pertinent wipe, assumed I'd spilled some detergent or something, and that was that.

And I didn't do any laundry for six days after that, so when I happened to pass by the dryer yesterday, and saw a bigger puddle of the stuff, I had reason to fret.

From what I know about dryers, which isn't much, I reasoned that there weren't any nasty liquids in the mechanism itself, with the possible exception of lubricant for the motor itself, and the law of gravity would tend to prevent it from rising to the top of the machine.

So it had to be coming from somewhere else. I looked up at the ceiling, but saw nothing of note. There's a wooden cabinet hanging just over the laundry apparatus; I popped open one door, and bingo.

Last winter, I had had quite enough of shoveling off the driveway, which is very long and very steep, and I bought a twenty-pound bag of calcium chloride, leavened with a few other cheap salts, for the specific purpose of removing the white stuff. I used about eight pounds, folded up the bag, and set it on the bottom shelf of that cabinet — on its side, because it wouldn't fit vertically.

Now if you remember your high-school or college chemistry, as I should have but didn't, calcium chloride is majorly hygroscopic: it attracts water the way celebrities attract paparazzi. This has been, you'll recall, the rainiest year in Oklahoma City history. So you've got high humidity, a relatively porous container, and a salt that craves water. The combination of the three, after repeated cycles of wet and dry, eventually brought measurable quantities of water into the bag of salt, and the salt dissolved in the water, and the solution dripped out of the bag and through the door of the cabinet and onto the top of the dryer.

I'm going to move something a trifle safer up there — say, a gasoline can.

Last month, poor Fillyjonk had to replace her water heater, which prompted this unfortunate (as in "ill-timed") comment from me:

I subsequently learned its age, which is twenty-two; I also know when it died, which was the twenty-second of October.

And for icing on the cake, 1985 installation practices are light-years away from 2007 code, which means further expense.

On the upside, the water line has been shut off, and leakage into other rooms seems unlikely at this point.

Phillips-head, about four inches long, 3.9 inches of which I discovered embedded in my left rear tire as I backed out of the garage.

If you were wondering about the perfect end to the perfect day, well, that wasn't it.

On the upside, all the plumbing is done, and I mean all of it: not only is the new tank in place, but the modifications required by code have been completed, including a new gas line, a new flue, and a nifty little overflow pan that looks for all the world like something I used to collect Pennzoil in. What's more, while the old tank was draining, the guy replaced the leaky faucet at the kitchen sink, which was the next item on the repair agenda, on the basis that the sooner I get this stuff over with, the less I have to worry about it.

The new standard for 30-gallon tanks, it appears, is 28 gallons, which is not exactly progress. On the other hand, the piezoelectric pilot is kinda cool, especially since I don't smoke and therefore don't generally have a lighter at hand.

Total damage caused by leakage: zilch. (It pays to stay on top of these things.) On the downside, usually I have to go out of town to spend money this fast: this little excursion into plumbing cost more than my last trip to the emergency room. Probably did more good, though.

Most of the termites in this state — and we have lots of the little SOBs — live underground and only manifest themselves at dinnertime. The state, unsurprisingly, has a keen interest in seeing them go hungry, and if you've bought a house here in the last four years you've had to deal with the dreaded Form ODAFF-1, the Oklahoma Official Termite and Wood Destroying Organisms Report. I duly paid for an inspector, who informed me that so long as I continued annual inspections, they'd cover the cost of treatment should the buggers show up.

Today makes inspection #5, and so far, so good: if they're dining in the neighborhood, someone else is buying, and that suits me just fine.

As determined at the front door:

2000:  0
2001:  0
2002:  0
2003:  0
2004:  0
2005:  5
2006:  0
2007:  9

Let it be noted that I spent twenty minutes trying to get the porch light to stay on long enough to accommodate those nine little monsters. (It has one of those light-sensitive gizmos on it which lately hasn't been sensitive to anything at all.) Eventually it paid off; in fact, I had to kill the switch to shut it down.

I'm starting to see more kids in the neighborhood generally, which I hope is the beginning of a trend. I think we have something to offer in this corner of town: relatively-affordable housing stock in better-than-average shape for its age (sixty years), proximity to shopping, and one of the better city schools within walking distance.

I got home from work — late again, no thanks to somebody else's malfeasance (my own malfeasance is usually quickly fixed) — and in the twilight I noticed something brown and bumpy down by the curb. A mass of unraked leaves? An item forgotten during Bulky Waste pickup? Nope: it was the metal cover to my water meter, in place but for some reason inverted, leaving the lock mechanism upright. A quick dash to a faucet revealed that no, my water hadn't been turned off. (I've never been late on a city utility bill.) And there was no indication that there had been any water-line work on the street.

Perplexed, I left a message with the city's Action Center, as this incident didn't qualify as an after-hours water emergency. No harm done, apparently, but I figure somebody ought to know about this.

The annual "Dear Taxpayer" letter from the County Treasurer has arrived, and it's always of interest, since I am in fact paying taxes (boy, am I), and there's a section that details how much of this year's property tax is going to which governmental functions.

For the curious:

• $32.85: Oklahoma County-Wide School Levy
  
• $20.55: Oklahoma City/County Health Department
  
• $41.26: Metro Library System
  
• $82.20: Oklahoma County government
  
• $122.58: Metro Tech
  
• $126.55: City of Oklahoma City
  
• $450.09: Oklahoma City Public Schools
  

The complete list of tax rates in this county is here, and it's a long one.

How many bloggers does it take to change a light bulb?

We're about to find out. I have a small track-light array over the breakfast bar, and by "small" I mean "three lights." The middle bulb has burned out, and I haven't a clue how to replace it.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I pulled out a little wire clamp, a glass lens dropped into my hand (fortunately), and the face of the bulb was exposed. Unfortunately, the shape of the mount makes it impossible to get any grip on the darn thing. I'm assuming that some sort of tool is needed, either a suction cup or, well, something other than a suction cup.

The annoying aspect of this is that I'm going to have to acquire the tool, take it home, remove the bulb, and then go back to the store to buy a replacement. I'm not even sure what size this thing is, though it looks like a PAR20. Here's hoping I can find CFL or even LED replacements, because I don't want to do this very often.

I betook myself this evening to a store specializing in light bulbs, and got to enjoy the ineffable delight of sounding like a complete idiot as I described the track-light situation that has befallen me. The proprietor listened patiently, and then came up with this: "The easiest thing would be to bring in the entire fixture, and we'll swap the bulb. Just disconnect it from the track."

He saw my "You can do that?" look, realized he was dealing with a person of limited technical prowess — I can build a PC, fercrissake, but don't ask me to change the spark plugs in a sideways V-6 — then pulled a track unit out of a box and demonstrated the technique. "Most people have to see it done before they can do it themselves, and all the instructions in the world won't make any difference."

I asked about the possibility of Technological Improvements, and he was doubtful: "Not over where you eat dinner, unless you don't want to look at your plate." Given the quality of my cooking — but never mind. Right now, I have to go knock a fixture off the track.

There was a record called "Making Love Out of Nothing At All," which, if mentioned in passing, sounds like the sort of thing you'd get if you got Air Supply to do a Jim Steinman song. And indeed, that's what it was. The closest blogospheric equivalent, I submit, is getting three posts out of changing a light bulb, fercryingoutloud. (1; 2.)

So I presented the entire fixture, detached from the track, to the guy at The Light Bulb Store. (That's the name of the place. Truth in advertising.) He looked at it for a moment, reduced it to its component parts in a second or two, and produced from behind the counter a suitable replacement bulb. I stared, dumbfounded, and not just because "This little thing is fifty watts?"

I bought two spares.

At home, though, I managed to regain a sliver of my self-respect. At the end of dinner, the little wire bail that holds the lens in place suddenly didn't: the lens dropped onto a potholder (good fortune, that), but the bail was nowhere to be found. I briefly entertained the idea of returning to the store, remembered that it closed at five-thirty, and finally reshaped a paper clip (alleged "jumbo" size) into a replacement bail, which wasn't all that much more unsightly than the ones on the other two lamps. At least I'd contributed something to the proceedings besides cash and time.

This wasn't the only bit of weird electrickery I've been going through, but that's another post.

The palatial estate at Surlywood was purchased just about four years ago from a very lovely woman who wouldn't budge an inch on the price. She'd bought it only a couple years before, and in one of her first official acts, decreed the installation of a security system. It remained behind when she left; I signed up for the same monitoring service, and they sent a minion out to give me a perfunctory explanation of the control panel and to change the codes to something other than what she'd had.

Friday afternoon, I was greeted by the usual robot noises, but this set was timed differently. I punched in the Shut Up Already sequence, and discovered, between the usual AC and READY indicators, the scary-looking word BAT. A quick look at whatever documentation I could scrounge up, and I was ready to call the service.

"If I'm reading this right," I said, "the backup battery, the one that takes over when the power goes off, is in its death throes."

"That's what it is. Looks like it's about, oh, six years old. About time for it to go."

"What should I do?"

"We can send you out a replacement. Very easy to install. Twenty-five dollars, no charge for shipping and handling. Should be there in five to seven business days. In the meantime, the system will still work on AC."

"Good enough," I said, and put it out of my mind — until about 2:20 am, when the off-tempo robot noises returned. I silenced them and went back to bed.

Over the next few days, the infernal beepage returned at random intervals. I called the service. "They do that. About every four to six hours there's a self-test to make sure everything's working. When something's not working, well, you just heard it."

With the four fingers I wasn't already using on that hand, I counted up five to seven business days. Thanksgiving obviously doesn't count; does the day after?

So I popped open the cabinet, to the extent that "popped open" applies to a metal box that's sealed with Phillips screws, and found the offending component. Looked just like a Sears DieHard sent through the debigulator: same lead-acid chemistry, same 12 volts, though obviously not up to the task of starting a car. I grat my teeth and betook myself to Batteries Plus, where they had a whole shelf of the little bastiges.

Twenty-four ninety-nine. The robots are silent. And when the dawdling courier finally drops that surprisingly-heavy package at my door, I'll have a backup backup battery.

(No, I didn't post about this earlier, for the simple reason that it struck me as a Bad Idea to let on that my security system had acquired a temporary weakness until such time as it could be repaired.)

Remember this?

And on the seventh day it showed up. Technically. (Order placed on 16th, which was a Friday evening; figure 19, 20, 21, skip two days for Thanksgiving, 26, 27, 28, 29.) I should point out, though, that if I'd waited for it, I'd have gone quite mad by now for lack of sleep. And now that I don't really need it, I'm tempted to offer it to a neighbor at a discount.

So I went out into the back yard to survey the damage, and there was a big chunk of elm tree sitting on the shed. No big deal, until I looked up and discovered the broken end of the branch actually leaning on the power line, which meant basically I had to move this section of frozen tree up and away to keep it from eventually snapping the line off.

There are maybe ten, twelve other places where the line still could give way, but I'm just glad I caught this one before anything could happen.

Going to work? Not even. Power's completely off at 42nd and Treadmill.

Not by any means. Here's a look at what's happening:

Normally, those two trees are about eighteen feet apart. Below, a tree across the street is seriously fragged.

I am not getting out to take more pictures if I can possibly help it.

Addendum: Vphotorob has a set of storm photos up on Flickr.

There was actual sun today, so I ventured into the back yard, a place I'd been avoiding due to my longstanding aversion to mud, to see if anything could be salvaged from the westernmost chaste tree, which looked dreadfully bent over where it wasn't actually broken.

A closer inspection, though, revealed that I'd misread the entire scene: yes, there was bending and such, but no actual breakage. There was something broken, yes, but it was something else entirely: a limb from a tree on the far side of the fence, a tree that belonged to someone on the next street over.

So I got to play treedragger instead of treehugger, which is a lot of work considering the distance between there and the curb.

Payback is a Biatch Dept.: Along the west fence, there's a cottonwood which a mulberry has been attempting to assimilate, Borg-like, by surrounding it with a multitude of trunks. Not being a big fan of either flavor of tree, I decided last year to let the drama play out and see what happens. The cottonwood shrugged off the ice barrage; the mulberry took a major hit, losing roughly a third of its trunkage. "That'll teach you," I said as I dragged yet another mass of ex-tree debris across the lot.

There are still branches here and there to pick up, but they're on the small side, which means that for all intents and purposes, major cleanup here is done — except for getting an inch and a half of red mud off my shoes.

My old elm tree, I think, will come out of this just fine, despite having about twenty percent of its volume reduced by the storm — or perhaps because of it, since the weaker limbs, as you might expect, were the first to fall. The tree behind it is something less of a success story, though it looks better now than it did two weeks ago, now that all (or anyway, most of) the dead stuff has been cleared away; I figure a one-in-three chance of coming back in the spring. The big stack of stuff in between contains wood from both. (Substantial embiggening can be observed here.)

That's no longer the question; the contractor hired by the city picked up the Assorted Tree Segments on my block today, a bit sooner than I'd anticipated despite my comparative proximity to the center of town. (I am, as the phrase goes, out of the loop.)

They didn't seem to leave a whole lot of crud behind, though one house was skipped entirely; I'm guessing that someone was parked in front of the curb, preventing access to the stuff.

Addendum, 8:15 pm: The CityNews flyer that accompanies the utility bill contains the following revelation:

But not until, so don't mix your regular Big Junk with your tree limbs.

At about 10:15 everything went dark, or as dark as it can manage two and a half hours after sunrise, and for some reason I was spooked. I get through an ice storm of epic proportions with no more than flicker, and now, on a sunny morning, the power is down?

I did the perfunctory check of the breaker box, called OG&E, grabbed a snow shovel, and began cleaning up at curbside, mostly because it beat the hell out of just sitting there waiting for something to happen. (This is, incidentally, the best time to hobnob with the neighbors, because they're always coming outside to see if anybody else has power.)

According to SystemWatch, about 3000 people got knocked off the grid; half have been restored. I doubt that any trees were involved.

Winds today were ferocious — Will Rogers Airport reported sustained winds in the 40s for a few hours, and gusts well into the 50-mph range — so I was a tad apprehensive on the way home, quite apart from the discomfort that comes from being blown across the freeway. (One unfortunate fact of automotive existence: cars that don't complain when you have them change direction suddenly also don't complain when the wind has them change direction suddenly.) At the very least, I expected some broken limbs.

And I found one, presumably off the mulberry tree adjacent to the driveway. Nothing else seemed to have been affected, until I ventured out the back door and discovered one of my trash bins on its side. It was empty, which simplified the task of upending it, but the angle at which it lay suggested that the wind had spun it at least 135 degrees before gravity kicked in.

I should note that its resting place was only a couple of paces from where an old sweetgum tree blew down in 2006. Evidently this is the locus of wind activity at the palatial Surlywood estate.

And I decided to blow it off, as it were. For one thing, Big Blue is only one-third full. For another, the winds howled last night until late — the Will Rogers station reported gusts over 50 mph — and a trash bin upended is way low on the list of things I need. Besides, putting it out this morning would have required me to roll out of bed before 6 am, which is a violation of all that is holy. (The truck usually arrives around 6:10, even on Tuesdays following Monday holidays.)

There's always next week. I don't generate so much waste that I need to have it hauled off every seven days without fail.

Cue Talking Heads: "You may ask yourself / How do I work this?"

When I bought this shotgun shack house, it had already been fitted with a middle-of-the-line security system with battery backup and a remote transmitter which was set up to trip or reset the alarm as needed, or to open or close the garage door.

Last month the remote quit working. Assuming it was a battery issue, I betook myself to Batteries Plus, which in a couple of seconds came up with what looked like a sawed-off AA that somehow was rated at 12 volts. I squeezed it into the none-too-capacious space provided, and ... nothing.

In a rare display of prescience, I had located and downloaded copies of the appropriate manuals some days before, so I knew the procedure for setting the communication protocols. It didn't make any difference, though; the remote refused to talk.

After some further Net work, I found a place that actually sold these things, for twenty-five bucks a pop, and snagged a pair. And the first one actually responded to the correct commands, if you reversed the button order from what was specified in the manual. I read over the stuff again, looked at the schematics, read it again, and decided that the manual was actually wrong, based on the following premises:

• The reversed button order corresponds to what you would expect if you were keying the commands on the wall panel;

• If the remote processor, which is separate from the main unit, had been hooked up backwards, the wall panel wouldn't have been able to initiate the add-remote function at all.
  

The second one? It's still in the box. I don't feel like pressing my luck. (Same as it ever was.)

We're not putting in spruce, technically, but Brian Dougherty of the Oklahoma City Community Foundation dropped by our Neighborhood Association meeting tonight to hand us a check: we'd qualified for a grant from the Margaret Annis Boys Trust to help rework our little stretch of park along May Avenue. There's a fair amount of sweat equity involved, inevitably, but it helps to have the nursery bills paid before you start planting, and we picked up just over $8500 to support new trees and the watering thereof.

Here's a brief bio of our benefactor. She would have been 99 this year.

County tax assessments are out, and I can use this paragraph all over again, almost:

Still, this beats the hell out of all those the declining values they keep whining about on the news.

I'm starting to think these little redbud trees — one of them is not so red, but so be it — are eventually going to fuse themselves into one big tree.

They obviously didn't suffer much during the ice storm, though.

(Embiggened version at Flickr.)

An unexpected mid-April freeze (normal low this time of year is 48, fercrissake) gave me some pause, but heck, it only got down to 30, so I figured I'd salvage something from the flower box, and sure enough, things are coming in.

Perhaps due to the weather, the rosebush closest to the house came up with the first buds. One's opened up nicely; another's on the way. (The bush farthest from the house produces the pink stuff like this.)

Irises were in short supply last year, but 2008 looks promising. This cluster usually produces white; an occasional orange one pops up. There have been blue ones in the back yard in years past, but marauding mulberries have crowded them out.

Clicking on either will take you to Flickr versions in multiple sizes.

An album track by Led Zeppelin; also, the approximate volume of twigs and other limb fragments, per square foot, in my back yard at the time of the First Spring Mow. Most of them were left undisturbed: this year's lawn regimen calls for no buzz cuts, so the mower height has been adjusted accordingly, and rather a lot of them fall under the threshold, as it were.

The typical mid-mow "Holy ****, will you look at that" revealed that the Huge Rosebush had a bad case of sciatica or something; I trimmed off some of the weight in an effort to give it some stamina. It's producing, though not a whole lot; it may do better with less to support. Meanwhile, the blue irises, which made no appearance at all last year after I cleaned out the stragglers in their bed, are flourishing (in purple!) after I made no attempt to clean out the stragglers in their bed this year. What I know about botany isn't enough for me to dare suggest that the proximity of mulberries has dyed these flowers.

Long-time readers will recall that I lost one of my twin sweetgum trees to the Oklahoma winds, and that after the remains had been ground to a pulp and hauled away, one sapling appeared in the same general area. I figured the ice storms killed it: as of ten days ago it had not one single leaf. Says you, says whoever is in charge of these things: it's putting out all manner of leaves, though it's not appreciably taller. Yet.

And while I worked, birds did recon missions: I spotted a jay up in the east chaste tree, and a couple of robins were reporting in to Ground Control. Either urban birds have become utterly fearless or I've gotten the hang of being inconspicuous: the robins paid no attention to me or to the gizmo in my hand with the big (sort of) sharp blades.

One small bit of serendipity yesterday: I'd earned a 10-percent-off day at Target, due to vigorous use of my Red Card at their pharmacy, and they had my choice of HVAC filter for $8.99, a buck off the usual, so I wound up shelling out $32.36 for a year's worth.

This is a standard-sized filter, nominally 14 x 25 x 1. In practice, it measures more like 13.7 x 24.7 x 1. Also in practice, it's apparently still too wide for its slot: it takes some serious bending and wedging to get the darn thing into place, and it's a good thing I only have to do this every 90 days or so. Curiously, the vents where I work take this same size, and it simply slides into place with no issues.

I should point out that when I arrived here in 2003, I found a so-called "permanent" filter which looked like a giant Scotch-Brite pad; it appeared to have been there since the Devonian period. I duly vacuumed up the crud and returned it to duty, but the first time I had the system serviced, the technician gave me that "How could you?" look and installed what he considered a proper filter, which was indeed labeled 14 x 25 x 1. And he didn't work up a sweat in so doing, either.

The next width down is a nominal 12, which means about 11.6, which will fall through the mounting and into the Phantom Zone, so that's out. Is it just me, or do other people have to wrestle with this minor detail?

I seem to have lost my "B" set of keys. The "C" set is where it always is, and the "A" set is with the car keys and such, but the "B" keys, which are the ones I usually carry for working in the back yard, have disappeared. Oddly, yesterday I didn't pick up this ring, as I already had the "A" keys with me.

I am just paranoid enough to want to get the locks changed — there are three — but not enough to call out a locksmith on a weekend. (Any local folks who can recommend one, please do so; I haven't had to do this sort of thing in ages.)

There exists a shed in my back yard, made of the lowest-grade pre-corroded steel-like substance; its sliding doors have long since ceased to do so, and I store nothing of note behind where those doors used to be. (Right now, it contains a section of kitchen cabinet that was scissored out to make room for a larger fridge, and half a bag of potting soil.) And when the rain is heavy enough, you can hear Beelzebub practicing the harpsichord.

That said, I'd never dream of removing it, and the reason for this is amazingly simple: it is perfectly placed to intercept the majority of tree limbs that could fall across my electrical connection. It caught one during the December ice storm, and it caught one today, the result of the sort of wind you get when a cold front crashes into a mass of Gulf moisture. (There's a tornado watch to the east of here.) Supported by the roof of the shed, the limb, a good nine feet long, managed to deflect the line by only an inch or two, well within the capacity of its strain relief. Wielding a plastic snow shovel I keep handy for just such occasions — hey, it beats the hell out of actually shoveling snow — I had no problems moving the Big Wooden Thing away from the line, whereupon it dropped to the ground with an ignominious thudlet.

So the shed remains, which means that in terms of shed count, I remain even with contemporary composer Arthur Jackson, despite his nickname.