First Weekend - Prepping for Fumigators

As any 50+ year old house in warm weather, ours is a haven for spiders and probably other icky yucky bugs. Our home inspector thankfully didn't find very much termite damage at all, but in the corner with the water damage there is a little termite damage too. Those blind little buggers are good at finding moist wood (call it their version of dinner and drinks). SO, we're getting the house tented (yup, think big circus tent) and fumigated this first week of June. Before doing so, we had to prep the house and yard for the tent to come down. This involved taking down one of our two NASA-grade ginormous antennas, and ripping out a monstrosity of a plant along with trimming some other plant growth in the backyard. (I'm going to use the word monstrosity a lot... it's nicer than the other words I had for that thing!)

After spending all morning and afternoon in Foster City for dragonboat practice, and Jai and I each coaching after practice, we went to Costco to buy a handy-dandy "Little Giant" ladder which made Jai's weekend (except for when he nearly knocked out a customer at the store and when the ladder came crashing down on his toe...ouch :S). If you're a handy guy, you'd drool over this ladder too. It's basically like the Swiss Army knife of ladders... there are like 20 ladder combinations in one, and it folds down to an itty bitty size after you're done.

I, on the other hand, was very happy with my $10 hand saw, which basically was my saviour against the forest of plant growth in the back yard. As you can see here, the grass in the back was at least one foot tall. Some of the tall grass, half the orange tree and the plant "monstrosity" had to be cut away so the tent can be tacked down around the house.



What I wasn't prepared for at first, was the hornet factory in the backyard. There was a constant vigil of at least 5 hornets on guard around the orange tree in the back and basically anywhere I wanted to be. I had to wait for Jai to get back from OSH to grab one of his tshirts from the car and fashion myself a protective bee-bonnet/Arabian headscarf.

Jai got a tool-belt and outfitted it with his arsenal of tools and rust spray to bring the central antenna down. My dragonboat butt-pad came in handy for his knee on the roof too.

After a few sweaty hours, Jai got the antenna down and I clear-cut more green than a Brazilian farmer. Although we were both making good progress, the yard was actually starting to look messier because I ran out of space in the yard waste boxes, and the antenna had to lie in the back yard until we figure out how to get rid of it. BTW those boards in the picture had maggots under them!! The giant plant is behind those.
Jai checked out the other antenna but it's a bigger job than his big and my puny muscles can handle together. He also found a family of spiders living near the other side gate. I'm so happy we're fumigating the house!

I didn't get a great picture of how huge that giant plant-thing was, but the end result of all the cutting, digging and twining up the waste was one giant green yard waste box, two recycling boxes, three garbage bags and 4 tied-up bundles of branches and leaves. I surprisingly wasn't too sick of green to get a Matcha Green Tea smoothie from Jamba Juice afterwards!