There is a patch of my front yard that’s been bugging me for a while. And by a while, I mean since we moved in. There was a shrub that grew to a great height, but I had always considered it to be one of those “freeway” shrubs. Nothing pretty to look at, but grows quickly and serves a purpose. The wife liked the privacy but I’ve always hated it for its attempts at my life while hanging Christmas lights and for generally being in the way while mowing the lawn. I removed it during a weekend of great marital strife.

I wanted to replace it with something that would give us privacy, be attractive, and generally be out of the way. I looked online for small shade trees and found a dwarf crape myrtle that looked promising. The particular cultivar was called tonto, and since there was very little chance of finding one locally, I went online and found one from a grower in North Carolina. Excited by my find, I skirted my usual background check of online companies and ordered immediately from fast-growing-trees.com. Of course, after I placed my order, I started researching the company and became dubious about their reputation.

The tree arrived about two weeks later, and I am more than happy with its condition. They sent a FedEx tracking number as soon as they had packed it, which was about a week after placing the order (well within their 1-3 week estimate). I received it a week later. It was very well packaged and had survived the long journey across the States to California. It had lots of leaves and there were four separate trunks. It was easily 3 feet tall (it was advertised as 3-4 feet). I was very pleasantly surprised. Here’s a picture:

Yesterday, I planted it. Here’s a picture of it in its now-natural habitat (pic was taken near sunset, so the top of the plant is bathed in sunlight and looks a different color. Also note the new Italian cypress [juniper] to the rear):

After reading some of the horror stories about ordering online from this company, I was expecting no more than a dry broken twig rattling inside the FedEx box. Instead, I received a professionally packaged, healthy tree, with several flyers containing planting instructions and tips for caring for the tree after its traumatic shipping journey. While it is possible that the complaints against this company on the internet are valid, I suspect that they are simply the competition’s attempts at defaming fast-growing-trees.com. If you read between the lines, the complainants make very little effort to resolve their issues with the company before blasting them on the internet.

I probably would not have blogged about this experience but for the fact that I wanted to share my positive experience with Fast Growing Trees Nursery. I would order from them again.

Today the tree looks very happy in its new home. I am looking forward to many years of growth, flowers, and marital bliss. Kudos to Fast Growing Trees for supplying me with this very attractive specimen!

The wife alerted me to this story broadcast recently on NPR. TerraCycle, a small company that sells worm castings as fertilizer, is being sued by Scotts, the maker of Miracle-Gro. If you’re interested in the scoop, be sure to click on the “listen” link at the top of the page and position your earholes to within a comfortable distance of your computer’s audio delivery system.

Instead of competing on merit, Scotts has decided to throw assloads of money at their lawyers to rout out the little guys. What a waste of time and resources. Shame on them.

I will not buy Miracle-Gro ever again.

At first I thought it was a rat hole in my front yard, but the next day there were several large dugouts with displaced dirt fanned about them. My first gopher. The little mongrel even popped out of his hidey-hole to say hello.

I returned fire with my garden hose, and as it turned tail down its burrow I stuck the hose as far down as it could go and left it running full blast until water began to surface in other areas of the yard. I didn’t see it escape, and water isn’t a very reliable method of gopher termination, but I haven’t seen a new hole in two days. Maybe I got him.

Those little buggers are certainly destructive.

I spent a long day on Sunday beautifying the long-neglected North Yard area at the front of my house. North Yard being a high-winded phrase for the 15-by-5-foot area to the right of our driveway which is dominated by a large green utility box.

I transported a lot of the eroded dirt from the front to the rear and supplemented our “Chula Vista Concrete Fill Dirt” with rich organic compost and mulch. I planted a couple of dwarf angel’s trumpets, four calla lilies and a bunch of white petunias. On top of it all went a generous layer of cocoa mulch, followed by red-colored wood mulch next to the driveway and walkway. It was beautiful. After I was done, I thought, “I should turn on the sprinklers to find out whether I broke anything with all that digging.” To which my tired and hungry body said, “Nahh, it’s fine, let’s go to IHOP!”

To IHOP I went.

The next morning, there was a large sinkhole in the middle and one of the angel’s trumpets was completely uprooted. Mulch had made a large trail out our driveway and down the street. Ugh… how embarrassing! I spent an hour Monday morning before work cleaning up the mess. Apparently I had ruptured one of the pvc pipes during my furious digging.

Moral of the story: always check your irrigation after working with spades.

This weekend, I bought more mousetraps. Following are some (edited) accounts of my experiences that I emailed previously to my mother. Be warned, this is fairly graphic!

*****
Saturday night
*****
We bought traps today — somewhere around 10 mouse traps and 4 rat traps. I set 4 mouse traps earlier this evening and have replaced all 4 with fresh traps, and I’m a bit proud of my 100% kill ratio.

The fifth was a bit more interesting.

I went out there with my flashlight and saw that I had ensnared a small-to-medium-sized rat. But it wasn’t quite dead yet. Its paws flittered under my flashlight, attempting to extricate its head from the vice grip of the trap. Feeling some amount of urgency (while I don’t like rats, I feel badly that they would suffer a long and painful death), l went into the garage to find a good bludgeoning instrument. I took out Dad’s old shovel but changed my mind since I didn’t want to pick up rat pieces. And somehow I didn’t want this act to stain this tool that had been handed down to me. I found a scrap 2×4 and thought it would do nicely.

Whack. A good, solid blow to the head.

Still moving — or should I say convulsing.

Whack. Whack. Still moving. Trying to get away.

Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack. This thing still lives??!?? Whack some more. I hear the scurrying of feet amongst the rose bushes: a friend, fleeing in terror.

I think I understand why, when you hear about fatal stabbings and bludgeonings in the news, people stab their victims more than 50 times. Mammals are hard to kill. It takes time to bleed out and for their bludgeoned organs to cease viable function. People probably don’t know that until they’re faced with it.

I feel changed. There is a place that I need to put my head to do this kind of thing, and it’s more than a little bit disturbing. Once you’ve committed yourself, there’s no going back.

*****
Later that night
*****
I went out again to check my traps.

One had been tripped, but no quarry. Dang — my 100% kill ratio is toast.

Sweep the flashlight to the left, and I see the rear of a small-to-medium-sized rat, panting under the lantana. For whatever reason, it doesn’t run. I move. It doesn’t. It looks like it’s eating. I try to get a better look, but can’t get a good angle. Finally I get down on all fours, crouching on the grass, and get a look at its face. I see a speck of blood. I feel a bit of pride knowing that the trap wasn’t completely unsuccessful. Except now I know I have to get this thing out in the open and kill it: man vs. rat, and it’s personal.

I use the 2×4 to herd it to some open real estate. It struggles slightly, but its wound must be siginificant or it would have seized the opportunity to run. It looks cagey.

Whack. Whack. “SCEEEEEEeeeeee!” but still quite alive.

Whack, whack, whack, whack. This seems all too familiar. Damn, one of those whacks got a sprinkler head, hope it’s not broken. Finally I hear the sound of bones crushing, and after a few final convulsions and a strangely misplaced eye, it appears to be over.

I probably shouldn’t be doing this in sandals.

I set two more mouse traps last night. I checked them about two hours later. I saw that they had been tripped, but in the darkness I could not tell what, if any, prize I had caught. As I moved closer, I made out the shape of a very large mouse. Closer still, I realized this was no mouse. This rat died a very shameful death: caught by a mousetrap. The ants were quick to find a meal of his eyes; almost as quick was I in relaying the story to my wife whose tranquil evening was now interrupted by the disquieting thoughts of scurrying rodent feet just outside our door.

We have bird feeders in our back yard, and unfortunately birds aren’t the only animals that benefit. In the last couple of weeks I have noticed the scurrying of tiny feet behind our rose bushes, so yesterday I set some mouse traps.

This morning I looked out the window to see if I had any takers. Apparently I had, since the mouse traps were not to be seen. As I made my way toward them, I smelled a slightly skunky odor and I imaged a poor skunk with two mousetraps attached to its feet. That image was just slightly more comforting than the thought of rats setting off the traps and scurrying to their holes to plan their revenge.

I spotted the two traps hidden behind a rose bush. All I could see was a tail and a nice swarm of ants: apparently a cat or other foraging creature had beaten me to my breakfast. After scooting the traps out to the open with a stick, I bagged my prizes. Gutted. Shredded. Yummy.

I’ll have to set more traps tonight.

One of our toilets has been leaking for awhile, so I went to the hardware store and found a replacement kit for all of the tank’s innards. And I do mean all of it.

Installation took me a good two hours. Probably more, but I wasn’t watching the clock. Why oh why do they make tanks so dang heavy?

Once I was finished, I noticed some minor leaking from one of the screws that holds the tank to the toilet. Replaced the washer and the leak seemed to go away… only to find that in all my messing around, the other screw started leaking. Tightened it up, put some buckets under the toilet, and so far no leaking after a full night of usage. And when I say usage… you get the picture.

Total cost: $19.99 for the kit plus tax and several hours of labor. Once I finished, I decided that the next time I’d rather hire a plumber to do it correctly, but now that a day has passed, and I have a bit of experience… I never seem to learn from anything do I?

At any rate, +1 for me. That toilet’s got nothing on me.

Over the last year or so we’ve noticed the disconcerting smell of mildew emanating from our downstairs bathroom. My brother-in-law, who works for a plumbing contractor, was kind enough one weekend to take a look and we discovered that mildew had infested the entire wall behind the sink, and it was quite wet in there. Unfortunately he did not find a leak, but recommended one of his buddies to us.

When we talked to his colleague, he advised us to call our builder since the house is less than five years old. We should have done that a year ago when we first noticed the smell.

The builder sent a representative over the next day and work began the following day — and they would have come sooner if we could have fit it into our schedule. They found that whoever had installed the light fixture had drilled a screw into the drain pipe leading away from the upstairs bathroom.

As I’m writing this, a dehumidifier is hard a work removing water and the drain patch is setting.

I am relieved on many counts:

• There is a definitive cause of the leak
• The leak and resulting damage are reparable
• It won’t cost us a penny.