Hot Times in the Big City

Yesterday in the midst of all the tree toppling, we had a visit from the apron inspector.  That would be the driveway apron, not the one I use for cooking.  He had a fine posse of 3 young men from Benjamin Hays High School in tow.  He was setting a fine example for them as they came along in his shadow, learning how to use a measuring wheel and other skills.

While he was on the phone with his supervisor to ask how to inspect an asphalt driveway apron, I chatted with the teenagers. The burly, strong looking fellow staring at the camera told me that he was the nose guard for his high school football team.  Looks like he'd be a good one, doesn't he?  Then he told me that he wanted to go to college to study to be a mortician.  The football fan in me kinda liked that -- a nose guard who kills 'em, then chills 'em.  Wouldn't you just love to meet the career counselor at Benjamin Mays? 

Any way, in spite of having no experience whatsoever with asphalt driveway aprons, the inspector told us that we had to dig out the gravel the previous inspector had told us to put in there and replace it with a bed of asphalt below ground level.  So, Steve the driveway guy dug it out.  When Jason went racing down there on his bulldozer, I thought he was playing chicken, but he was just offering to help smooth things up.

The asphalt was spread in there by hand.  It was 300 degrees.  The air temperature was in the mid 90's.

It was hot times in the big city.

Before long the inspector came by.  He approved the ground work that had been laid.  Hooray!

Meanwhile back at the bat cave, the batmobile was firing its lasers.  Well, okay, it was the paving machine and they were flames for keeping the asphalt hot, but it was cool, anyway. 

Well, okay, it was hot.

Before too long we had a paved driveway!

Somewhere in all the excitement, Drew came by and starting marking the trees that will be used for lumber in our house.

Later in the day, he came back and sealed the ends of the logs with a custom color that marks them as ours.

I kept thinking that I had seen the color before, and it finally hit me:  Its exactly the same color as the Wicked Witch of the West's face!

I'll get you, you little pretty!

I think maybe the heat is getting to me.

Last night after supper we had one more important job to do.

Jason had graciously lifted out the quince for me and set them aside.  So, we gathered our tools - and our strength - and headed over to replant them.  I thought it was neat that my sweetie and our kids were replanting the same quince bushes that his grandmother - their great grandmother - had planted so many decades ago.  I also think they'll look great and make a nice screen around the transformer.

Breaking Ground (and Losing Trees)

Early this morning, the woodland flowers were reaching for the sun.

The butterflies were visiting the abelia.

None of them realized that the end was near.

Behold the beast!

The beast was hungry and demanded to be fed.  Like a Jurassic giant, it began to devour the woods.

The trees couldn't outrun the savage maw of the mighty trac hoe.

But as the trees were felled, Jason the grader and his trusty assistant, sawed them into logs and set them aside for Drew to give them new life as floors.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, the pile of logs for flooring grew.

Tomorrow Drew Leviton will come and take the logs away to be sawn into boards.  Then he will store them in a barn. When the house is nearing the stage for flooring, he will kiln dry the boards and take them to a mill for planing and tongue and grooving.

I'm glad that we can return the trees back to their ancestral home in some way.

Jason and his assistant were as gentle as they could be.

First they dug around the roots.

Then they tipped the trees over.

The branches and root balls were piled neatly up to be chipped into mulch for erosion control.

It was all done in a very neat and workmanlike fashion.

But still, it was sad and some of the images were disturbing. 

The red earth streaming from the root balls seemed like the trees were bleeding.

And somehow the rootballs being carried by the trac hoe over to the mulch pile resembled decapitated heads to me.  By the end of the day, the debris pile looked like a scene from a Gheghis Khan biography.

So sad that progress has to come at such a price.

Free at Last!

Nothing left on the pole but an abandoned telephone wire.

Today Comcast came out and finished up their work.  They got their cables off of the utility pole and spliced all the new underground cables.

They concealed everything in tidy little pillars.

Now everything is ready for our grading guy. Let's hope the basement he has to dig tomorrow has no rock, so that he can come out on Thursday and start clearing the lot.

Hey, Baby, I'm the Telephone Man

Just tell me where you want it, and I'll put it where I can...

The telephone man put it right on the pole.

He had these little boxes that were nifty and made it look so easy.

Haven't I seen them at Radio Shack?

AT&T won the contest with Comcast to see who could be off the pole first,

but I did question their method of cutting the wires off the pole first and then leaving everyone without phone until they got things hooked back up.

At any rate, they got Comcast's competitive juices flowing, so Comcast sent out a crew to move the meandering lines on the back of the lot.  The steep sides of the drive made trenching too difficult, so they had a "chain gang" of diggers.

Doesn't the soundtrack for "O, Brother, Where Art Thou" just start playing in your head?

They looked very effecient, but I felt sorry for them when I saw how far they had to go with their trench:

At the end of the day, I think Comcast was still on the pole, and AT&T had everyone hooked up but left their lines laying on the ground.  Two households had their wires crossed, but that was corrected before anyone had the idea to make prank phone calls while the Caller ID's were switched. 

All's well that ends well!

Waiting for the Cable Guy

That's pretty much what it boils down to. 

Today Georgia Power finished up connnecting the last 2 houses to the underground service.  I didn't know they meant it literally when they said they were going to cut the power to the houses.

I think this guy kind of liked having me take pictures.  He struck a nice "bucket truck pose" for me.

I may have to give his name to that modeling agency I got the little boys from.

These guys were awesome.  They got it all hooked up, took down the transformer and all the aerial lines and then cut the top off of the power pole.  All the power company guys got after me for calling it a telephone pole.  I guess it's okay to call it that now.

Looks kind of naked without the transformer, doesn't it?

And now we're just waiting for the cable guy -- and the telephone man.

Power to the People

This is a good sign.

It is a very good sign.

It means that the tranformer and the power cables will be one.  In fact the circuit is complete to three houses.  Two more to go!

I got to satisfy my curiousity about how they hook things up inside the transformer.  No gigantic wire nuts, as I had imagined.  Instead they attach a big plug and just plug it in!

To splice into the existing underground cables, they had to dig to find the new cables and the old cables.  Given the age of the old cable and the fact that they were "hot," they did most of the digging by hand.  It was very suspenseful because although we had a genereal idea of where the cables were, we didn't know exactly.

That's why they broke out the most sophisticated technology they had:

That's right, blog fans, when you need to find something under the ground, nothing works like a pair of dowsing rods.

Here you go.  The rods have pointed toward each other.  The cable is right here.

And so it was -- more or less.

They had this nifty gadget to splice the two cables end to end.  It took a lot of cleaning and wiping and spreading special glue and crimping and twisting but in the end the old and the new were made one.

Tomorrow the splicing and empowerment for the last two houses and then down come the overhead lines and the power pole!

What a Transformeration!

Well, the last I heard was that the company that was to set the transformer was going to try to get to it this week.  I was thrilled to drive by today and see them hard at work.  I was also sad, because I had a day full of running around and could not come take pictures.  I really wanted to see how they were going to take all of those massive cables and hook them up.  I had envisioned a wire nut the size of a Big Gulp from the 7-11.

Now I'll never know.

But, wait!

Maybe when they come back to connect the existing underground cable to the new underground cable I can see how it's done.

X marks the spot!

Maybe, just maybe, we can get all the power switched over this week.

Then next week can belong to Comcast and AT&T.

Then goodbye telephone pole!

One can hope!