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Ah, spring. Time to rise with the sun and saunter into the garden, where the robins are chirping and the mourning doves cooing ...
... in order to pick up the zillion cigarette butts one of the neighbors has thrown into the ivy over the winter. Ugh. Disgusting. But it seems that no matter who lives at that number, they like to heave stuff off the balcony -- everything from cigarettes to chairs. I didn't quite have the oomph to go after the big stuff this morning. I'm thinking of investing in a no-littering sign once I've got it all cleaned up. One small effort toward staving off a local tragedy of the commons.
Mind you, while I was all bent over extracting the confounded butts from the ivy, I was entertaining a revenge fantasy in which the guilty neighbor walks up the path one evening and feels a tug at his left ankle that nearly trips him. He looks down, cursing, and tries to unwind the ivy runner that has grown across the sidewalk. But another one snakes up and snags his right ankle; then four more entangle his wrists. He's pulled over and dragged, yelling, into the heart of the ivy bed. Slurp, slurp, compost. Ha.
Then it occurred to me that, if this were the kind of horror movie wherein such things happen, he wouldn't buy the farm until the last act -- it would be I, poor, innocent, hapless, just-trying-to-help, who'd disappear first to establish the Green Menace as a threat; its motivations would be revealed only subsequently. Oops.
I'm upstairs eating breakfast now. With the door facing gardenward firmly closed.
... in order to pick up the zillion cigarette butts one of the neighbors has thrown into the ivy over the winter. Ugh. Disgusting. But it seems that no matter who lives at that number, they like to heave stuff off the balcony -- everything from cigarettes to chairs. I didn't quite have the oomph to go after the big stuff this morning. I'm thinking of investing in a no-littering sign once I've got it all cleaned up. One small effort toward staving off a local tragedy of the commons.
Mind you, while I was all bent over extracting the confounded butts from the ivy, I was entertaining a revenge fantasy in which the guilty neighbor walks up the path one evening and feels a tug at his left ankle that nearly trips him. He looks down, cursing, and tries to unwind the ivy runner that has grown across the sidewalk. But another one snakes up and snags his right ankle; then four more entangle his wrists. He's pulled over and dragged, yelling, into the heart of the ivy bed. Slurp, slurp, compost. Ha.
Then it occurred to me that, if this were the kind of horror movie wherein such things happen, he wouldn't buy the farm until the last act -- it would be I, poor, innocent, hapless, just-trying-to-help, who'd disappear first to establish the Green Menace as a threat; its motivations would be revealed only subsequently. Oops.
I'm upstairs eating breakfast now. With the door facing gardenward firmly closed.
