|
My Photographs You like photos? I love taking them. Click here, if you wanna see some of my work
Is a photo missing on an older entry? Click here to find it at Photogra!  The Other Links Favorites and Rings are now here!
The life you save might be mine!
|
Monday, Feb. 20, 2006 - 3:08 p.m. Today was my Aunt Marge�s funeral. Lease was able to get bereavement time, so she went with me to the funeral home. Only immediate family was told about that part of the funeral (all the newspaper listed was the burial site and time, no visitation). Include us there were maybe 12 people at the funeral home. I ended up being asked to be a pallbearer. There were only 3 of us available, so they ended up using employees to help carry the casket to the hearse. (btw- aren�t the restrooms in a funeral home the cleanest ones on the planet? No real reason to mention this fact, but I was impressed today. Felt bad about actually using this one actually. But I digress�.) Maybe another 12 people were waiting at the graveyard. Right in the middle of the pastor�s reading, a 21 gun military salute was fired for the other funeral taking place maybe 100 yards away. That freaked a few people out, but I looked over at my Dad and he was trying to keep from laughing. Nothing like a little black humor to take the pressure off of the moment�. So� what happened next door yesterday? For once, it was nothing involving the police. The D.D.Neighbor has become the Former D.D. Neighbor. Over the past week they have made numerous trips, hauling their personal possessions away to whatever neighborhood they have now chosen to infect. His high-risk lifestyle is no longer our problem. But his dilapidated former home still remains a problem. Early yesterday afternoon, I noticed a couple of strange noises when I took the boys out to the back yard. One- an faint, intermittent �beep beep� sound was coming from inside of D.D.N.�s house. The closer I came to the windows on our side of his house, the louder the other sound became. What sound? Well- I couldn�t see anything from the outside, but what I heard really reminded me of this:
Once I stuck my nose up to his window and peeked through a broken slat in his mini blinds, I saw what was making the noise. Water was rushing down from the second floor, running down the windows in his kitchen (on the other side of his house), and flowing both into his basement and outside onto his patio:
Lots and lots of water- a water line had ruptured in the upstairs bathroom.
This close-up shows just how fast the water was moving:
What caused this to happen? My guess is, he turned the furnace way down or off once he moved all of his belongings out of the house. The low the night before was -5� F, the coldest night of 2006. In other words- he wasn�t smart enough to drain his water lines before he turned the heat too low, and he had a ruptured water line to show for it. We didn�t have a phone number to reach him (unlisted- can you imagine that?), so I called the phone number for the �realtor� on the disposable sign in his front yard. Ended up getting the �realtor�s� voice mail, so I left him a very simple �water is pouring out of the second floor� message. We called a couple more numbers of people we thought might know how to reach him (his uncle, the BBQ man, wasn�t home, but Lease reached his son-in-law) Maybe 2 hours later, D.D.Neighbor finally showed up to shut the water off. He was inside his old house for about 15 minutes. As he was headed for his car, I stopped him long enough to tell him we had called around so he would know what was happening. He thanked me, and told me what I already knew (the pipe had ruptured), and that his basement had about 4 feet of standing water in it. He left without doing anything to remedy that problem. When I went outside this morning, there was frost formed on the INSIDE windowpanes on all of the ground floor windows. I don�t know if he turned the heat back up, or just shut the water off. All I know is that decrepit money pit is edging closer to condemnation and demolishment each and every day. The neighbor on the other side of this house and I had another conversation about this situation, and he again agreed that we should buy the lot after the city removes the mess. It would probably be sold through a tax sale, since I don�t think any realtor would want to take possession of the house as it now sits. Sure would be nice to build a garage on that land, and increase the size of my fruit tree orchard. Hey, it doesn�t hurt to dream, does it?
 powered by SignMyGuestbook.com
Have You Read These?
A hot day for a wedding...9:26 p.m. - Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009 So bad - but so funny, too.10:33 p.m. - Saturday, Jun. 13, 2009 Evil Black Walnut Tree from Hell!- times up!6:41 a.m. - Thursday, Apr. 23, 2009 My next door neighbor was on the Today Show?8:57 p.m. - Tuesday, Mar. 31, 2009 This qualifies as a "oh crap!" moment:9:55 p.m. - Monday, Mar. 30, 2009 Back to top
|
