My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Maple Tree Removal and the Mosquito Control Visit

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Maple Tree Removal and the Mosquito Control Visit

My 30-year old maple tree in the front yard.

Two events happened in our household this week.

1. The first event was a surprise visit from the Mosquito Control Office. Yesterday morning at about 11AM, I heard a loud knock in our front door. Without opening the door, I asked what does he wants and identify himself. ( Never open your front door without investigating, because it could be an intruder).

Knocker: Open your door!! ( Voice with Authority). We have a complaint about your swimming pool.
Me: Who are you?
Knocker: I am from the County Health Office. I am an Inspector.
Me: Show me your credential. Through the peephole I saw he was not lying.
Me: Ok, if you want to inspect the pool, go by the side of the house. I will open the door to the pool.

The past three weeks, we did have problems with the pool. The filter and vacuum was not working so the water was cloudy and greenish. Luckily my son has started cleaning the pool a couple of days ago. We have ordered a new filter and vacuum for the pool(on line). The pool was still not clear blue, and last week it was inhabited by algae, so the water was turbid and greenish. My son had already shocked the pool with algaecide and chlorine, but the water was still not crystal blue, but there were no mosquitoes.

I asked the inspector if a neighbor did the complaint. He said he is not allowed to tell me who complained but said he is checking for mosquitoes because of the Nile Virus. He took a sample of the pool water and murmured that it probably need more chlorine. He walked out satisfied that our pool was not a breeding place for mosquitoes, although we have a few mosquitoes in our back yard.

I was thinking that if the neighbor did not complained how did the county know of our swimming pool problem? Did the helicopter viewed through Goggle map and observed our pool water was not crystal blue? Was our ordering of filters and vacuum cleaner on line triggered the visit? I will never know the answer to the two questions above. One thing for sure: Big Brother-the Government is always watching you.

2. The second event this week is the removal of our 30 year-old maple tree in our front yard.
Last month we heard a big crashing sound in front of the house while we were eating lunch. My son immediately went to investigate. Come here, Dad! He shouted.

One of the three main branches of the tree(see photo) broke and hit our front lamp and damaged it. The next day my son bought a chain saw, cut the fallen branch into 24 inches firewood sizes and changed our lamp. I immediately call two tree companies for estimates to remove the maple tree.

The first estimate from Stumpman ( I have hired the company before for tree trimming on my side yard) : Removal of TREE- $525, Grinding the stump-$110, Hauling of Wood-$75 and Disposal fee-$ 26 with a total of $736. He gave me a $36 senior discount quoting $700 as the total cost.

The second estimate was from Andersen Tree Company. Doing the same job above, removing, grinding and hauling, I got a quote for $750. While we were discussing the quotations, Scott Andersen, the estimator and owner( blond white guy in his 50's-must be Swedish) asked me where was I born. I said in the Philippines. His face lightened up and informed me he is married to a Filipina. He immediately showed me a picture of his wife. She is very pretty and her name is Portia Cortes originally from Mindanao. Scott said he liked Filipinos so he will give me a $100 discount. My net cost will be only $650.

I told him to allow me to consult my wife on the price. I went inside the house and told my wife of the price and if she has no objections if I invite Scott for some Pancit Canton, I just finished cooking. Scott came in and eat the Pancit with gusto. While we were eating, he informed us that he had been to the Philippines twice and has been in the tree business for over 20 years. He has been married to his Filipina wife for 4 years and they had no children.

Scott wrote the work order. I asked him when he can do the work. He said in two weeks. I pleaded that I will be very happy if he can do the job next week, since I am planning on hiring my landscaper to remove the grass and replaced it with a drought resistant ground cover next week (after the tree is removed). Scott promised he will try his best to accommodate my request.

Note: This is the first time, I have invited a complete stranger for dinner. In this case, Scott was very friendly and that he is married to a Filipina -so I did not hesitate in inviting him for dinner-Pancit Canton with Prawns and Chicken

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Maple Tree Removal and the Mosquito Control Visit

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