Sewer work – Dear Liza

Dear Liza,

We knew the sewer work was coming, and now it is RIGHT in front of our house. Between now and Friday, if we will need the car during the day, we need to get it out of the driveway before 7 AM, and then can’t bring it back in until after 6 PM. This, in a neighborhood where street parking is already in short supply.

We were going to get the Christmas tree today, but don’t want to get up early, park our precious Miles on the street, or carry the tree for blocks, so we will wait until next week.

This weekend is busy with a Christmas Art Pop-up, where Auntie Bridgett is showing her work at her friend Nicole Curcio’s house. That will be fun! But there are cookies that need baking to feed the art-lookers. So I will be walking down to Safeway with my backpack to pick up butter, eggs, and such to make a double batch of Oatmeal Everything cookies.

Inside the house, it is very noisy and shaking from 7 to 6 everyday. Fortunately, we still have Christmas decorations and our Mouse kitten to make us smile.

But all the racket can make me grouchy, I will admit. I have even been channeling Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas“:

They’ll come with the diggers, the rollers and flashers!

They’ll bring all their dump trucks and huge asphalt slashers!

I sat at the coffee table, with my tense fingers drumming,

“There must be a way to stop Construction from coming!”

Love,

Grandma Judy

Dear Liza,

Well, for weeks now we’ve seen and heard the work coming closer. Huge excavators, dump trucks, ditch witches and jack hammers have torn up (and put back together, mostly) street after street.

The work is to modernize the sewer system for our neighborhood and to install swales to help clean the street run-off water. I am glad the work is getting done. Poor Pacific Grove, down by Monterey, hasn’t done this sort of work for a hundred years, and they have sewer spills almost every month in the summer, making their lovely beaches into smelly, unhealthy messes.

But man, is it noisy! Pounding to get through the asphalt, then scraping to get the asphalt into the dump trucks. Then comes the digging to get to the pipes, then the schreeching as the pipes are dragged into place.

Oh, and the vibrations! Room sized piles of gravel dropped from tall trucks sound like avalanches, and the steamrollers feel like rolling earthquakes.

It seems now that our street will be torn up just in time for Thanksgiving, and probably stay torn up until Christmas. Barring, of course, delays because of weather… snow and sleet are in the long forecast.

Cross your fingers!

Love,

Grandma Judy

Tag: Sewer work

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