Neighbourly Interactions.

We can go for weeks, months even, without seeing the neighbours then, like buses, they all come at once. Glen was over on Friday, distributing potatoes. Anna gave him eggs in trade. He mentioned our rooster, the one that's decided to live out and crows from 3am. He mentioned the donkey that used to go off like a foghorn at 4am. "When Laverne sold you that house he had a clause in the sale agreement saying that you knew this was a farming area and there might be tractors and pesticides and so on." He said. I said I remembered. "What we should have had was a clause protecting us from you and your farming activities". I took that to mean that we're getting to be accepted around here.



He bitched about Canada Post, apparently they've been auditing mailboxes and this is suddenly offensive to them:

They have, of course, been delivering to it for decades. Now it has to be moved ten feet. Ten feet to the right would put it in the middle of the driveway so I suppose they mean ten feet the other way, then again, Canada Post is not renowned for efficiency or for logic so maybe they do want it in the driveway. Neither move has obvious merit.


Merv, our nearest neighbour, has also been ordered to move his mailbox, from his house to ours. I hope Canada Post doesn't expect him to move over here as well. What Canada Post wants, of course, is not to have to deliver the mail, they want everyone to use a communal mailbox such as they have in housing projects. They should perhaps be mindful of the trend to the use of email, we don't actually need their service.


Anyway, we dutiully moved Merv and Bev's mailbox next to ours.




Now we can both get letters from Canada Post complaining that I don't move the snow quickly enough. The base of Merv's mailbox is 41 and three-quarter inches off the ground. There will be another audit and they may discover that it isn't the demanded 42". Maybe they won't notice that but will detect that ours is 43" off the ground and demand that it be lowered. I'm not converting by the way, perhaps the only merit of Canada Post is that it's not metrified.


While we were out there measuring and remeasuring, Ian from up the street stopped to chat. He said that he had crashed into the tree that had fallen across the road a week or so ago. He was incensed that, as soon as he stopped, windshield shattered, the lights on a police car parked at the scene came on and a cop came over to discuss whether or not hitting a tree on the road in the dark was careless driving. "Serve and Protect" it says on the cars. Ian felt neither served nor protected. He did however say that he has a huge fallen maple tree and no longer has a wood stove. He wants to borrow the tractor to move some decorative rocks around (well, actually, to steal them from the gravel pit) and offered the wood in trade.


I went over with theLand Cruiser and the chain saw. The tree was in a gully lined with three foot tall wet grass and it was raining. I decided to try going down there anyway. I sawed and loaded and, with trepidation, set about driving out. As mentioned in past posts, the LC doesn't have a great heating and venting system so I couldn't see out. I blasted up the side of the ditch, turned hard right where I remembered the driveway to be and shot out on to it.


Alas, I hadn't considered that there were several yards of top soil in a pile on the driveway. Thunk. The LC came to rest atop the pile.

(Poor picture quality due to there being a thunderstorm in progress). I fetched the tractor but to no avail. In order to get the angle to pull I had to be on sand and the wheels just dug in. Fortunately Ian is a truck driver (as an aside, one might note that that's quite some house to be building up from a shed on a truck driver's wages).

The Peterbilt pulled the LC off the pile in seconds.

I didn't want to drive into the ditch again so, for the next load I tried going around through a wheat field (a track through the field takes us to the gravel pit, I wasn't squashing the crop). The track was blocked by yet another fallen tree.

I didn't pause to cut that one up but I did stop to wonder about the weather. I don't think this area used to have such winds and so many tornadoes. Global warming brought about by chain saw use, no doubt. I took two LC loads and a tractor bucket load of wood away, half a cord maybe and there's very much more.

It's an attractive idea, heating the house for free from a sustainable resource. Shame it's such hard work!