nancynall.com » Hand upon the plow.
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Hand upon the plow.

Home­own­er­ship sucks. Respon­si­bil­ity sucks. Noth­ing like home­own­er­ship — par­tic­u­larly in a mar­ket with declin­ing real-estate val­ues — to make one yearn for the sim­pler days of an apart­ment, a mail­box with every­one else’s by the front entrance, a com­mu­nity pool and a call to Main­te­nance when things went wrong.

A lit­tle his­tory: In true Detroit style, a pre­vi­ous owner of our house was enam­ored of gas-hungry machines, specif­i­cally recre­ational vehi­cles. In what may be a metaphor for the rela­tion­ship between motor vehi­cles and the nat­ural world, they used this enthu­si­asm to ruin the back yard. They picked up the garage and rotated it 90 degrees, plunk­ing it in the god­damn mid­dle of the yard. In between the garage and the house, they installed a deck. This is nice. In between the garage and the back of the prop­erty, they poured another park­ing slab, and in the thin stretch left before the prop­erty line, they poured gravel. (In the sales list­ing for the house, this was described as a “play area,” the same way “squalid shit­hole” becomes “handyman’s spe­cial.”) Every­thing else was paved.

For the first two years we lived here, we regarded this arrange­ment with con­tempt. Alan in par­tic­u­lar was fond of refer­ring to “the auto­mo­tive engi­neer” who dreamed it up, even though he had no evi­dence that the per­son in ques­tion was an auto­mo­tive engi­neer; this was just the part of him that knew sooner or later we were going to have to right the wrong, vent­ing its entirely jus­ti­fied dis­gust. It would have been so much eas­ier, and likely cheaper, to keep the stu­pid RV in a stor­age facility.

Well. We don’t have the tens of thou­sands of dol­lars required to either move the garage back or, bet­ter yet, tear it down and build a new one where the garage should be, break up and remove all the con­crete and reclaim the back yard for the forces of good. But we had enough to get an esti­mate on haul­ing out all the gravel from the “play area” and replac­ing it with top­soil. The esti­mate was what we expected, so we told Mr. Land­scaper to get a crew over here and git ‘er done. Which he did. The Bob­cat had been work­ing for an hour when they hit the sur­prise. “A body?” I asked hope­fully. No, Alan said; they’d found giant heaps of broken-up con­crete. The neigh­bor ambled over and explained that when the garage was removed from its orig­i­nal foun­da­tion, they’d bro­ken up the slab and used it to under­lay the gravel in the back cor­ner of the lot, to sup­port park­ing for yet another very heavy recre­ational vehi­cle. Mr. Land­scaper said this would com­pli­cate things, that they’d need another man and a lot more dirt, but I said, “Let’s just do it the way it should be done,” and OK’d the cost over­run, which I was informed could increase the bill by as much as 100 percent.

The job got done and a good job it was. We added a cou­ple hun­dred square feet of arable land to what had been weed-pocked gravel. When the bill came, I swal­lowed hard and opened it.

It was more than triple the estimate.

After I picked myself off the floor, I told myself all the things you tell your­self: All home-improvement projects go over bud­get, or It’s a real improve­ment, and you knew that wouldn’t be cheap and Would you rather be look­ing at weed-pocked gravel for a third sum­mer? Each one of these plat­i­tudes was like a strong drink for my buyer’s remorse, and after I set­tled accounts with Mr. Land­scaper, Alan went to the nurs­ery and started plant­ing. It took him the week­end, but now we have a small herb gar­den, two rasp­berry bushes, some climb­ing roses, a but­ter­fly bush, some dead-nettle ground­cover, new hostas and a bird­bath. What had been imper­vi­ous land­scape is now nice and per­vi­ous again, and we’re putting oxy­gen into the air, plus grow­ing rasp­ber­ries. Which is more than you can say for those RVs, I hope.

Those birds bet­ter appre­ci­ate that damn bird­bath, is all I can say.

At times like this, it’s impor­tant to not think like a renter. Oth­er­wise you’d start think­ing dan­ger­ous thoughts about how you might have spent that $2,000 if you didn’t have a house. In days gone by, you’d say, “Ah, but the house will be worth 4 per­cent more at the end of this year whether I do any­thing or not, so it’s just gravy.” Around here, though, that’s not the case. This just in: The auto indus­try is implod­ing. Blame the engineers.

So. The Brook­lyn crew got 2/3 of the Jer­sey crew’s power struc­ture last night, and at episode’s end, Tony was all alone with his machine gun in a bed­room with bad wall­pa­per, lying on a bare mat­tress in the dark, wait­ing for next Sun­day and the last episode. I think that’s where I’m going to spend this week, too. The show is end­ing both the way we’ve always known it will, but not, if that makes any sense. Tony said, over and over and over in the last seven years, “Guys like me, we only end up dead or in the can,” and we keep telling our­selves, “Please, not for another sea­son.” Well, it’s almost over, and I don’t see it end­ing any way but dead or in the can. I’ve been root­ing for dead, but lately I’m think­ing it would be amus­ing to see Carmela’s house sold to another fam­ily in the final mon­tage, per­haps one of a non-white per­sua­sion. I’m not going to be happy unless Blondie is appro­pri­ately pun­ished, too. And I think, for her, that would be a fate worse than death.

Fave moment: When all the strip­pers and cus­tomers come out of the Bing to see what the excitement’s about. Was that a priest in the crowd?

Blog­gage:

If some­one asked for a show of hands of all the peo­ple who’ve heard “Respect” enough times that they never, ever want to hear it again, well, I’m reach­ing for the ceil­ing. Still. Make room in your head for one more, as it’s heard in Kel­ley Carter’s video pack­age on Aretha Franklin’s great­est hit, “40 Years of Respect,” on Freep​.com. A really nice job, with some great archival pho­tos and inter­views from peo­ple who knew Detroit’s daugh­ter then and now. My favorite nugget: When Franklin’s son reveals that mom had a cold dur­ing the record­ing of the vocal, and points out the line where you can hear her fal­ter. Roy Peter Clark, who teaches writ­ing through the Poyn­ter Insti­tute, uses the Otis Red­ding and Aretha Franklin record­ings of “Respect” to illus­trate the con­cept of “voice.” (Yes, how sad that peo­ple choose to become writ­ers and then have to learn what voice is.) One more note: A very old-school TV guy told me once that you could teach a word per­son TV skills a lot eas­ier than you could teach a TV per­son word skills, and boy do you ever see it here. If more TV jour­nal­ists worked like this, I might watch more TV.

Posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 8:27 am
in Popculch, Same ol' same ol', Television.

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31 responses to
“Hand upon the plow.”

  1. Connie said on June 4th, 2007 at 8:48 am

    Ah home own­er­ship. Last week my hus­band said in deep despair: “My truck is falling apart, our pool is falling apart, our lawn­mower has died, my kid goes to an expen­sive col­lege, and my job just died.” (Really, the 90 year old man he was help­ing out died that morn­ing.) This is our third year of major major patch­ing of a pool liner that really needs to be replaced at an esti­mate of $4500.

    As for gravel, I am think­ing a teenager could hand pick all the stones out of my land­scap­ing so I can replace them with mulch.

    Now I am depressed.

  2. John said on June 4th, 2007 at 8:55 am

    I played hedge/bush trim­mer all day Sat­ur­day and spent Sun­day pay­ing for it. My arms and back are still suf­fer­ing, but the shrub­bery is back under control.

    Any­one catch the spearchucker com­ment yes­ter­day at Fox?

  3. Dorothy said on June 4th, 2007 at 9:07 am

    Wouldn’t it be a hoot if Tony ended up shoot­ing him­self acci­den­tally while sleep­ing on the sheet-less bed? I will be in Colum­bus for my son’s grad­u­a­tion next Sun­day — and I intend to be back in the hotel room by 9 PM to catch the finale.

  4. colleen said on June 4th, 2007 at 10:18 am

    Sim­i­larly, we can teach you to do radio if you can write, but if all you are is a voice with no writ­ing skills.…go away. Because it’s just too much work, and it will never be ok.

  5. LA mary said on June 4th, 2007 at 11:00 am

    I just dropped a hefty chunk of cash on get­ting all my trees and brush up to fire sea­son stan­dards. I had them haul away stuff like the old kid­die pool and Lil’ Tykes bas­ket­ball hoop as well. We had maybe less brightly col­ored plas­tic crap than many, but more than I could stand, and it’s time in the crappy cor­ner behind the garage was way past over.
    The week­end was spent replant­ing creep­ing rose­mary ground­cover and a few flats of very bright red gera­ni­ums and Span­ish laven­dar for the slopes out­side the fenced part of the yard. It looks great out there and should be good for a few years. Older son is expand­ing the organic veg­etable gar­den so a lot of level part of the yard is taken up by that, but I still have a good side yard and three decks for hang­ing out, sip­ping iced tea. I have the urban anom­aly of a big yard, tiny house, which is fine with me most of the time.

  6. nancy said on June 4th, 2007 at 11:22 am

    Ah, fire sea­son — such a for­eign con­cept here in the Mid­west, where last I checked the humid­ity was 78 per­cent. I remem­ber my L.A. friends dis­cussing its unique pain-in-the-assedness, which involved inspec­tions and tick­ets and all the rest of it.

    I was just out look­ing at our lit­tle strip of heaven, and it occurred to me there may be room for a com­post heap/bin over by the herbs. Why is gar­den­ing so seduc­tive in June and repel­lant in August?

  7. Barb said on June 4th, 2007 at 12:11 pm

    Mis­ery loves com­pany, and I am not feel­ing so lonely any­more. Thanks for shar­ing your home­own­ers he** story.

  8. LA mary said on June 4th, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    Fire sea­son this year is going to be really bad. We had nearly no rain at all this win­ter, and every­thing is crispy. My neigh­bor­hood is very sim­i­lar in lay­out and foliage to the Oak­land Hills area that burned a few years ago, so every­one is really jumpy this year. The Grif­fith Park fire had ash snow­ing down on us a few weeks ago, and the refugees from that fire were sleep­ing in the gym of my son’s high school.

  9. michaelj said on June 4th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

    Respect is, after all, an Otis Red­ding song, and Sis­ter Re’s ver­sion is very good, but the Otis at Mon­ter­rey (with the shout out – I thought Run invented that) is far bet­ter. Aretha’s finest, I think, are Chain of Fools and I Never Loved a an (the Way That I Love You).

    An esti­mate is an implied con­tract. It can be exceeded rea­son­ably with­out con­sul­ta­tion, but not tre­bled. Uneth­i­cal, like Dick Cheney, most likely ille­gal, like Dick Cheney. I’d write a check for the esti­mate plus maybe 50%, and copy the BBB. They will not go to court. Oth­er­wise, start­ing a job is a contractor’s license to larceny.

  10. sdh said on June 4th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    Those birds bet­ter appre­ci­ate that damn bird­bath, is all I can say.

    I have fond mem­o­ries of being a home­owner – now a renter, but that’s a com­pli­cated story. Over the years at my old place I grew to love gar­den­ing. The best thing about it was not doing it in August – just sit­ting on the back patio drink­ing and wast­ing time while watch­ing all of that green that I had planted.

    I miss my gar­den… but i don’t miss the has­sles of own­ing an old house.

  11. michaelj said on June 4th, 2007 at 2:17 pm

    Of course, Aretha never loved a Man, not a def­i­nite arti­cle. It’s hard to type in Hur­ri­cane Sea­son, with noth­ing but the Unin­ter­rup­ti­ple Power Sup­ply and the mon­i­tor for light. Far as Dick­less, I meant to include this. Is there a Nobel for arrogance?

    We’re not sup­posed to have fire sea­son on the bar­rier islands, but, day to day, every­thing here smells like burned wet dog thanks to the Oke­feno­kee immo­la­tion. Maybe 40 mph wind will alle­vi­ate the annoyance.

  12. 4dbirds said on June 4th, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    I feel your pain also. I have two mort­gages, yikes I need a renter fast, and if one lit­tle thing goes wrong my houses of cards will fall.

  13. LA mary said on June 4th, 2007 at 2:25 pm

    What will we do with­out Sil­vio? Aside from off­ing Adri­ana, he was my fave.

  14. nancy said on June 4th, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    We saw as much of Sil­vio as David Chase dared. Love him or not, Steve Van Z. is NOT an actor, and noth­ing showed it as well as the last sea­son, when he had to carry the episode imme­di­ately after Tony’s shoot­ing. God, it was painful to watch. Nearly as bad as “Christopher.”

  15. LA mary said on June 4th, 2007 at 2:45 pm

    I know he sucked as an actor, but his hair made up for it.

  16. Dorothy said on June 4th, 2007 at 3:39 pm

    He sure did suck as an actor. And I’ll have to rewind my tape and see if there was a priest in the crowd out­side of the Bing. Won­der if Carmella had time to gather up all the cash hid­den in the house before she bolted? We’ll prob­a­bly never know.

  17. LA mary said on June 4th, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    Speak­ing of vio­lent crimes, I was at the vet’s office Sat­ur­day morn­ing with Smokey the Lab, get­ting the annual vac­ci­na­tions, and I was look­ing at the lost/found bul­letin board while I waited our turn. There was a poster with a photo of a very nice pure­bred Eng­lish Bull­dog, but instead of it being lost, the poster said it was stolen at gun­point at the dog park. How awful. I know the dog park has seemed empty every­time I’ve dri­ven past in the last week or so. Now I know why.

  18. Dorothy said on June 4th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    Mary that’s just awful!! I’ve heard of dogs being stolen out of yards before, but that story is a first for me. My daugh­ter has a beau­ti­ful lit­tle cocker spaniel, who is admired by strangers con­stantly when she’s out and about. Hope that never hap­pens to her.

  19. LA mary said on June 4th, 2007 at 4:52 pm

    It’s ter­ri­ble. The guy with the gun could have shot the dog or the owner if there was resistance.

  20. brian stouder said on June 4th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    Shoot­ing the for­mer would cer­tainly defeat the purpose!

  21. Cynthia said on June 4th, 2007 at 8:49 pm

    Hey, Nancy, how about some pics of your now per­vi­ous plot?

  22. Cathy said on June 4th, 2007 at 8:54 pm

    The big joke around our house is that our new $12K roof is my 50th birth­day present. It is, after all, big and expensive.

  23. brian stouder said on June 4th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    We’re about to do the roof and gut­ters — and indeed the cost esti­mates are through the roof, prompt­ing gut­tural groans all around.

    But here in good ol’ Fort Wayne, and in our neigh­bor­hood — I am rely­ing heav­ily on a hybrid of Nance’s “Ah, but the house will be worth 4 per­cent more at the end of this year whether I do any­thing or not, so it’s just gravy.” nugget, mod­i­fied by my firmly held belief that we’ve put it off for so long that we really can­not help but gain from the improve­ment (even if the gain is only to being us up from sub-par to par value!)

  24. Dorothy said on June 5th, 2007 at 6:42 am

    ’twasn’t a priest — it was a guy in a black shirt and pants. No priestly col­lar on that guy. I rewound it 3 times to be sure. Painful to see Sil get shot over and over again like that!!

  25. Pam said on June 5th, 2007 at 7:15 am

    I know no one will read this because I’m maybe the twenty something-th poster but.….. You think you got prob­lems? Wait ’til you hear this! Got a quote for $8K to reface the front of the house with Hardie sid­ing, reframe the win­dows etc. Lots of wasps nests behind the old cedar and all the boards were splits and pop­ping off the house. Things go fine until they start the front win­dows. I will make a real long story very short. They dis­cov­ered that the rea­son all the boards in front were pop­ping off and not level is because the whole front wall of the house bows out!! Upon fur­ther inspec­tions and quotes, the house has jumped the foun­da­tion due to a very very faulty instal­la­tion of sup­port beams in the base­ment when the house was built. One of the guys who looked at it got vis­i­bly agi­tated! It was prob­a­bly one of the most excit­ing things to hap­pen in his base­ment foun­da­tion job all sum­mer! The final tab is not in, but I’m pretty sure it will be about another $8K or more. Here’s the REAL FUN — we have to remove ALL of the land­scape plants and bushes and stacked stone wall in the front so that they can exca­vate down to foun­da­tion level and hydroli­cally push the wall back in place. The guy said we might not want to be here when that hap­pens. He said the noise is really bad! Have you ever tried to get a land­scaper on short notice in the sum­mer?? We may end up doing this our­selves. But I just don’t know how we can get the heavy root balls up. We’re think­ing about just trash­ing 2 of the bushes and plant­ing new ones. Boo Hoo!!! I LOVE each one of those dearies! We are already exe­cut­ing Part I of my mas­ter plan. They need 10 feet of clear­ance in front of the base­ment walls so the base­ment is get­ting a MASSIVE CLEANING OUT. We’re doing more base­ment stuff next Mon­day because Tues­day is trash day in W’ville. Then we have to address the water in the base­ment prob­lem which I’m fairly sure (because our luck has been so bad on this) is going to involve remov­ing all the heavy stones in the shade gar­den, trench­ing for a new drain sys­tem, and re-installing the heavy stones. Hello, Dean? Can I afford this? Need­less to say, we are FREAKING out!! I would never have con­tracted a bath­room remodel if I’d know that we would have this esca­lat­ing series of foun­da­tion, drainage and brick prob­lems. Oh, did I men­tion? Guy says, “You may want to call a mason, the bricks on the front might col­lapse when we do this.” Argh! Too bad you can’t get rid of the entire land­ing strip in your back yard. But at least you now have a lit­tle green­ery. And the birds will appre­ci­ate the rasp­ber­ries. RV own­ers can be totally nuts about their vehi­cles and it’s a pas­sion I don’t under­stand. A man I knew at my last job had an RV. When every­one knew we were all get­ting laid off, he had a 2nd garage added on his prop­erty with 2 of those GIANT doors to park his RV in. The cost of the doors alone!! I can only imag­ine. And yes, he got laid off about 3 months after the garage was built.

  26. nancy said on June 5th, 2007 at 7:22 am

    This is what will hap­pen to Carmella Soprano’s spec house in a few more years.

  27. Dorothy said on June 5th, 2007 at 7:59 am

    Oh Pam I think it will take me about an hour for my mouth to stop gap­ing open after read­ing all that. Great goo­gly moo­gly!! And Nance, you really made me laugh with that comment!

  28. michaelj said on June 5th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    LA Mary. It’s crim­i­nal to name any dog Smokey. Like brand­ing him (I’m assum­ing) with the efful­gent crimes of Phillip (Can’t Fool the Fat­man) Fulmer.

    As far as Sil­vio is con­cerned, the great moment was his dream about the miss­ing cheese. I think this was an inside joke. There was never any cheese miss­ing on The Sopra­nos. There was The God­fa­ther and then every­thing else, includ­ing Good­fel­las that was purely the crap­pi­est movie crit­ics went nuts over that wasn’t called Rag­ing Bull. Really asi­nine, by Rocky standards.

    Sopra­nos is undein­ably enter­tain­ing, but when peo­ple start in on “morally ambigu­ous”, well so’s Karl Rove. Jesus, creeps are creeps. Lee Atwa­ter wouldn’t tol­er­ate Karl Rove. It’s the HBO flag­ship, but one. That would be Dead­wood. Can Robert Alt­man sue these peo­ple? We’d rather watch McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and the out­right theft of intel­lec­tual prop­erty is stun­ning. They couldn’t dupli­cate the incan­des­cence of Julie Christie, or Sen­a­tor Bul­worth, for that matter.

    Actu­ally, and I’m cer­tain about this, the quin­tes­sen­tial mob movie is Atlantic City. Elmer Gantry a tired old oil tycoon at the beach. We’d all have been a whole lot bet­ter off if he’d been pres­i­dent. Or Atti­cus. Instead we got the guy that wished he was Charl­ton Hes­ton, and thought Grover Cleve­land had been president.

  29. LA mary said on June 5th, 2007 at 10:40 am

    Brian
    Threat­en­ing to shoot the for­mer could moti­vate the owner as much as threat­en­ing to shoot the owner.

    michaeJ
    I’m going to tell my kids what you said about Smokey’s name. They will likely cry, and I hope you feel ter­ri­ble about that.

  30. DWF said on June 5th, 2007 at 1:56 pm

    We are rent­ing a house in Seat­tle. Rent­ing. We just spent $2700 to put in a fence, because we have a very large dog and a very large yard, and it needed a fence. Rent­ing. And that’s money we’ll never see again, either. Though maybe we can take the fence with us when we move and burn it for fire­wood, since we won’t be able to afford heat.

    We really love our dog.

  31. Andrew Jarosh said on June 6th, 2007 at 1:27 pm

    Once you’ve owned a condo, you can never go back to weedwack­ers.
    Andrew

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