The Yard – Got the Jimmy Legs

The Yard

Now it can be told

Ugh, the last few days have been miserable, and not just because of the rain. Sometime on Friday night, Decatur slipped out an open front window. We didn't realize it until the next afternoon. We started searching around the area, trying to apply some form of feline logic to the situation. It seemed to me she would have dashed across the street into the vacant lot/parking lot as it is easy to get into and hide. But the more we looked around, the more we realized how many places there are for a small animal to hide. Not the least of these is the church yard behind our house.

At this point we didn't know what window she went through, so we looked out in the back as well. The church has been out of commission for years and the lot (which contains both church, rectory house and driveway) is totally grown over and full of trash. So it's basically a stray cat's amusement park. I searched through it several times, rousting many other cats, but not the one I was looking for.

The circumstances surrounding Decatur's disappearance may shed some light on all this: see, on Friday night we let some cats into the house. One was that Russian Blue cat I spoke of earlier, the other was the Kool-Aid Kitten, who has an even better 'in' to our home: she's pregnant.

Last time Decatur was around a cat with kittens, she bolted and I didn't see much of her for over a month. I didn't know if this was the same situation or if she was really lost; she had never been out front before, and this weekend had been fraught with stuff to scare both cats and humans. Friday night there was some huge to-do down at the far end of the block; we heard what may have been shotgun blasts and soon the street was full of people, cops, ambulance, fire trucks. Not sure what the story was there but it was a bit unsettling. Saturday night as we were entertaining friends with discussions of how Bushwick is really much nicer than its reputation suggests, some dipshit started shooting a gun right outside our house. I'm still not sure what that one was about, I checked outside afterwards but saw no one in evidence, shooter or shootee (the next day the cops came and placed tiny orange cones next to each bullet casing; the bullets had shot out the rear window of an SUV).

So I thought Decatur might have been so spooked by the commotion that she had gotten herself really lost. Anyway, we kept up the searching and the fretting, I made flyers and posted to lost-pet web sites. But things wrapped up pretty much 20 minutes after I put up the flyers.

I noticed the parking lot gate was open, a guy from Luis Refrigeration was changing the tire of his company van, so I went in and asked if it would be okay to look around for the cat. I went to the back of the lot, which was covered with that bamboo-like stuff I so detested from my old back yard, shook a jar of cat treats and called her name. Like it was nothing, Decatur emerged from the underbrush. Just like that.

She was no worse for the wear, despite having been outdoors for all the huge storms of late. the tire-changing guy said that he had seen her sleeping in the cab of one of the trucks that park there. I brought her back inside and she seemed nonplussed to be home. In short, my sympathy levels dropped at light speed. Damn these cats!

Anyway, she's back home and she's being sweet again, so all is well. We have the house on lockdown so nobody's coming in or out for once. We're not sure what to do about the pregnant cat, I'm hoping to relocate her to the backyard, but she seems to be fine with living in the lot across the street. That may be the most ironic aspect of Decatur's sojourn: if she left because she didn't want to share space with the pregnant cat, why then did she move herself to that lot, where the very same cat spends most of her time? This is the logic you get from an animal with a brain the size of a walnut.

I'll have more stuff on the stray population, we have some real characters around here!

We are not daily beggars

Freddy the Formerly Stray Cat scared us the other night when she climbed over the back fence and into the church yard behind it. She wouldn't come back, bedding down in an old milk crate and staring at me critically when I tried to convince her to come back inside. I feared we'd have to start all over with her, slowly luring her back to the house, but the next day she ran into the kitchen like nothing had changed. But it had …

On a previous night, she got into a growling match with a big male cat that had traipsed into the yard. Now it seems she and this cat were pals; they slept next to each other in the church yard and hung out together on the patio. Not only that, but her ambassadorship seems to be attracting others. The other night we were sitting in the living room when I noticed a cat sitting on the kitchen counter. This is not unusual, but it wasn't one of our cats. It was a Russian Blue, looking pretty much show-quality, if a little on the thin side. He had come through the open window that sits above the counter. And Freddy's original friend kept lookout on the window sill. It then occurred to me that I had left that window open the night before in case Freddy decided to return, so they'd probably already done a dry run for this infiltration.

I don't know if these cats are strays (gently used) or feral (Born Free), but they bolted when we inched over towards them. The Blue cat really was a lot better-looking than pretty much any of our cats, it makes me wonder if I can trade some of them in. But we haven't seen it since. Meanwhile, the parade of neighborhood cats continues unabated.

Out on the street there are tons of street cats that appear to go from stoop to stoop looking for handouts. We keep getting visited by a calico kitten who momentarily garnered my sympathies because I thought she was covered in her own blood. I carried her out to the back yard and stuffed her full of cat food. Then I noticed the 'blood' splashed on her side much more closely resembled Kool-aid. I guess that's 'street smarts.'

There's no place for a street fighting man

Here's something to waste some time during your workday: Google Maps has added a 'Street View' feature that allows you to see a 360-degree panorama of your location. Granted, they haven't mapped out the most important areas of the city yet (namely, in front of my house), but I'm sure they're working on it. Oddly, they have actually mapped all of Bushwick Ave, which comes within a block of my house. This is odd because I would have thought they would have mapped out Broadway first, which runs parallel to Bushwick Ave. Then again, in my few driving experiences here, I noted with disdain how screwed up Broadway is. For such a seemingly vital thoroughfare, it's pothole-ridden and stoplight-laden. Anyhow, the photo above is a bodega I often frequent at the end of my block. My house is actually the other way down the street, but that view is particularly boring-looking under the eye of this map service. When they get down every street, though, you'll really have something. This should have some interesting ramifications. Now people can virtually walk down Atlantic Ave in Brownsville and East New York with impunity.

Meanwhile, it was a lovely weekend all around. One semi-disappointment was that the tree service guys never came back for all the remaining detritus. They had told me to keep a good portion of their fee as a deposit, which would be collected when they showed up to take all the vines and leafy parts. The logic involved was that this material needed to dry out to be easily handled (all the wood goes to a chipper and gets turned into mulch). Saturday came and went without a word, even after I tried to contact them. The forecast for Sunday was rain, so I got antsy, thinking if the whole reason they left this stuff was because it needed to dry out, getting rained on wasn't gonna help. So i got out the contractor bags and went to town on it. It wasn't actually that difficult, and soon I had almost all of it bagged. Now I just have to dole it out to the trash, and I've just saved a tidy sum on my tree/ladder issue. Still, it's not exactly good business practice to leave your customers hanging, especially since this guy was trying to sell me on many of his fence and deck-building expertise.

[via Curbed.com]

You can look but you better not touch

Cuttin Headz, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

I was feeling gross yesterday but I was planning on going to work anyway until Jeannie talked me out of it. As lazy as I can be, I still have trouble making that decision to call in sick, mostly because I'm still not used to the notion of having sick days (of which I actually have a lot left to use).

Anyway, this worked out well since yesterday was The Day They Came to Remove the Tree. There was an old tree that had been devoured by termites and had fallen in the back yard, probably several years before we came to own the place. This would be a very easy thing for anybody with a chain saw to remove. However, there was a catch: a 40-foot clothesline tower.

For those of you who don't know, or who haven't been over to Abby's backyard, in the olden days, people dried their laundry on clotheslines. To facilitate this for upper-floor tenants, a ladder-like device was erected at the far end of the yard with pulleys attached for each floor. I'm not sure how people originally attached the lines (I guess some poor kid had to shimmy up the ladder with a rope in his teeth) and voila, you had a place to hang out your wet socks.

Since the advent of the commercial and/or residential laundry facilities, clothesline tower fell into disuse. Ours in particular suffered from obsolescence, the previous owners let it rust so bad its base supports rusted through. So at some point somebody moved it to the side, threading it through the phone lines and letting the top rest again the branches of the tree in the adjacent yard.

So not only was there a tree to remove, but it was partially leaning on this giant, rusty, steel tower thing which was precariously balanced between a couple of thin branches and the phone lines for half the neighborhood (all the more reason to go to cellular phones). I had no idea who to call to take care of this, but when the tree guy came over he said, "Eh, we do this all the time." It took them about 2 hours to do the bulk of the work.

The tree was gone before I even noticed. They also pruned back several other trees that were threatening other cables, as well as a bunch of vines. Work was momentarily stopped when they asked me to look up pictures of poison ivy and oak to make sure the vines weren't poisonous. I inwardly chuckled, I mean really, poison ivy here? Please. So I printed out some pictures of it to compare and they continued clearing it away.

The clothesline tower also came down without much trouble, they just slid it out from between the cables (I think they did break a couple of small branched in the tree). once they had it down they cut it into a couple of pieces and threw it on the truck, like it was nothing. It was especially helpful that our home abuts a church yard, so they were able to back their truck right up to the back fence of our yard.

They took most of the big stuff, leaving the green wood to dry out for a couple of days. They come back tomorrow to take the rest of it, plus all the leftover wood from my studio project. I'm trying to pick out some of the 2x4s or whatever I might want to keep. But it's a joy to ditch most of that stuff, as it has been taking up so much space in the cellar.

Before the tree guys showed up, I let the cats run around the yard. Despite the fact that there is no fence between our yard and the neighbors, there are tall fences around the perimeter of the two, so I haven't worried much about the cats escaping. Well, at some point I realized that Freddy was nowhere to be found. Indeed, long after the tree people had decamped, I peered over a fence and spied her sitting under an old Schwinn in the church's yard. I plied her with cat food to no avail. I feared she would return to her stray-cat, bird-killin' ways.

It was at this time I realized there in fact was a thatch of poison ivy growing out of the corner fence. Jesus Christ! I don't know how to get rid of it, should I just spray it with weed killer? I kind of want to get rid of it before the guys come back for the rest of the debris, cuz they said they don't wanna get near it, lest treeman Tony ruin his momentous birthday plans for the weekend.

At about 9:15, Freddy strolled back inside. She's still not any nicer to us, but she knows where she lives at least. Here's an album documenting some of the day's activities.

Addendum: Here's a pretty cool page about an archaeological dig in a Brooklyn back yard that has pretty much the only reference I could find about clothesline towers (their was half the size of ours and apparently not sitting between phone cables).

Just the holes that we live in

One of the more consistent requests I get through this site is information about the fence post spikes I used to erect a fence in my back yard. Well, it was the back yard at the last place I lived, in Clinton Hill. People write me every so often to ask where I procured the metal base posts to secure the wood posts that support the fence itself. Despite the momentousness of the project, I totally can't remember where I got them. I bought them online from a hardware store from the west coast, I think (I wanna say Washington). They were literally the only place I could find them online so I went ahead and got them. But that company seems to no longer have an online presence, if they have a presence at all anymore. So I always feel bad when I have to respond that I have no further info about it when people email.

But that has all changed, for the time being anyhow. A web researcher emailed me, not to ask where to get the spikes, but rather what my long-term opinion is of them. You see, this guy has located them, both online and at his local hardware store, and just wanted to know if they were worth it. He sent me the link, so I can now proudly post it here for anybody wanting to put up their own fence but not wanting to futz with pouring concrete. Near as I can figure these fence post spikes work pretty well. i don't know that I would trust them if you constantly have people scaling your walls, but to hold up your usual cedar plank fence it seems to work fine. Now all I have to do is put a link to this post on the original fence post post.

You may have noticed, since I moved to blogger for this blog, there is a serious disparity between old and new blog. The Archives page is hopelessly out of date (for recent archives, only the link on the right side of the home page will get you anywhere), and of course, the comments on the old posts still don't work. I just never have time to fix that stuff, and since it's been like this for many months now and the earth seems to continue to spin, I'm in no rush to fix it. I've got curtains to hang!