My weekend began with the dawn sighting of a neighbor's car propped up on blocks, minus wheels.

There are acceptable methods for the home mechanic to rotate his own tires, but supporting the vehicle on landscape bricks isn't one of them. And you usually keep the wheels in sight.

Within a day, Rittenhouse Estates volunteers were out soliciting funds for the 2008 neighborhood patrol, wherein a real, actual cop drives around our houses all night doing what cops are supposed to do anyway but at our direction. I have mixed feelings about that. Yes, it's good that the locals are getting together to fight crime. But, as Jim Schutze has observed, you should not have to pay a gratuity to the same policemen who are already (supposed to be) patrolling your streets at your (taxpayer) expense.

How is the neighborhood patrol different from tucking a $50 bill into a cop's pocket with the admonition that he "take care" of your street? Duty hours; that's about it.

It's an officially sanctioned protection racket. Poor people, of course, can't afford to participate.

Last time the neighbors came around asking for money, they did their best to make me feel guilty for enjoying the benefit of nightly patrols without chipping in. Well, it was their idea, not mine.

Enough gritching. I had work to do.

we drove out to my parents' vacant house, having been summonsed by the local magistrate to either fix the fence or remove the last of it.

Dad had built a picket fence around his property about 10 years ago, and the city almost immediately took issue with the style. I don't know what eventually came of their dispute, because they left the fence standing—an unlikely outcome if there actually were a code violation. It remained until the pine lumber began to rot about a year ago, and sections started falling off. After he died, I knocked down all but seven of the most firmly planted four-by-four posts, which he'd anchored in concrete. IMO they weren't much of a distraction to the neighbors; six months passed before someone complained.

So this afternoon I spent about two hours soaking the earth around the posts, kicking them side-to-side to loosen them, then shoehorning them out with a pickax.

Extracting fence posts is second only to pulling stumps in degree of difficulty, which is why nobody likes to do it, including this fellow at right, whose laziness announces itself to me every morning along my commute. Though in better focus.

There is no way around the hard work. You use every muscle in your body to pit irresistible forces against immovable objects. That I haven't seen the inside of a gym in 16 months became apparent very quickly.

Eventually, two of the seven posts broke off, and the rest I was able to extract by getting under their concrete anchors with the pick, or, when the mud formed an impenetrable vacuum, hooking the pick directly into the post and prying against the ground. I thanked God for the fiberglass ax handle, without which I could never have dared to leverage my whole weight.

I also paused to thank God I do not have to work outdoors every day in the heat because, as usual, I got a headache. This seems to happen no matter how much water I drink, even if I start downing it beforehand, as my doctor suggested.

Little Roo was with me on the job for a little over an hour while Squeeky and Squinx went shopping. As with most one-year-olds, he took about five minutes to find the most dangerous/filthiest spot, in this case stepping right into a muddy hole I'd created with the pickax. Sigh. I cleaned him up in the kitchen sink and we worked indoors until his mama returned.

to wrap up the project, i had to drag the concrete-laden posts the full width of the property to a corner of the driveway where, I hoped, the city would pick them up. I swear, Dad must've used a whole bag of concrete for each of these, as the only way to budge them was to tie a rope around one end and pull them like a plow horse.

The rope was a Wal-Mart close-out special last year. They were selling off summer seasonal items; this was a tow rope for dragging an inner tube behind a boat, or something. It added up to a good 50 or more feet of weather-proof nylon lanyard, which has so far been used to hang a backyard swing with enough left over to dangle a teeter-totter from another tree out front. The length you see here was stored in the Explorer for whatever reason you might need 25 feet of rope in an SUV. In this case, it kept Rittenhouse from a bad case of raw hands after dragging half a dozen 90 lb. weights across the yard.

Dad's neighbor has been keeping an eye on the place these past 10 months while the probate court thinks about actually doing some probate work. He came out just as I'd dragged the last post to the corner. He's such a friendly, helpful man that I wish I could import him to be my own neighbor. I'm going to miss him when the place is sold.

Being the laid-back sort, he asked why I didn't just saw the posts off at the base. I had to think about that.

"I'm the kind of guy who, when he insulates his attic, he first removes all the old insulation."

He cringed.

Someday they'll make a pill for me, when fastidiousness becomes as unfashionable as depression. In any case, I am comforted by the fact that someone else saw the posts and complained to the city, while I actually did something about them.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 12:52 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 972 words, total size 7 kb.