There Be Dragons!

I think I already mentioned that our city is putting in sidewalks on our street. Apparently they were able to get some federal funding and as far as I can tell, it's only our street. Or perhaps we're just the first street. I'm not sure why our street is the victim... er, winning street. I think it has something to do with providing sidewalks for kids walking to and from school, as that was the reason sidewalks were put in on the busier street that runs along the side of our house. There's a junior high school just down the way. In that case, it was actually somewhat beneficial to us, as it stopped the kids from walking through my gardens.

But I have yet to find a neighbor who's particularly happy about getting sidewalks on our street. It means we all have to park our cars somewhere else when the snow plows come through. In the past we were able to pull our cars up where the sidewalks will be installed. Obviously that option won't be there any more and most of us don't have large driveways, as this is an older neighborhood.

I'm trying to look on the bright side. Once the sidewalks are in people will be parking farther into the street (when there is no snow) and it will narrow the driving lanes. We have a lot of traffic because our street is a convenient way to cut over to one of the only streets that goes out of town. Maybe this will help reduce the speed of cars just passing through.

They started on the other side of the street from us, went all the way down to the end of the street and then started working their way back up to our house. Yesterday they gave us a moat!

And look - there be dragons! Noisy ones with big teeth. They growled and dug and made sleeping difficult this morning.

I went out to take these photos and discovered that at the corner of our property they had cut into my rock garden and then hauled away the rocks they'd dislodged. They also cut one of our soaker hoses in two. I wandered up the road until I found a foreman and explained the situation to him. He was very nice. He had the "dragon rider" return my rocks. He also came over to check the hose and said they would replace it for us.

While we were standing in the dirt chatting, he kicked some of the dirt around and than bent over and recovered an old creamer bottle that had been hidden under the street all this time. Since it wasn't discovered on my property, I couldn't lay claim to it. Instead I went and got a shovel and did some treasure hunting for myself.


I didn't find a whole bottle, drat, but I did find a lot of treasures. Glass, bones, half an old electrical insulator band. I felt like an archeologist. What if the bones were human bones!? Yathink I could convince David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel to come and investigate? Unfortunately they look too big - probably cow bones. Maybe dairy cows? To go with the dairy bottles?


My favorite was this glass that had turned luminscent. I know the bottles wouldn't have been multi-colored originally. I wonder what creates the change? Age? The type of glass? A reaction with the soil or the oil from passing cars or some sort of bacterial reaction?


I also liked the ones with painted or raised lettering. It was like finding shards of heiroglyphics. Now all I need is an old town phone book, the local Rosetta Stone, to decipher the "strange markings".

It made me suddenly wish that William was a young homeschooler again. I pictured him grabbing a shovel and having fun with me. Alas, he was off sitting at a desk in a classroom - not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes even a fun thing (I liked school), but I'm guessing not as much fun as digging in the dirt.

So I had to make my own fun.

"There was a little girl,
who had a little curl,
right in the middle of her forehead...."

"..... and when she was good,
she was very, very good,
and when she was bad,
she was horrid."

For the latest update on my wall painting, go check out Laumes Studio.