Brooke here:
The rough green snake Brown found in our front yard.* It was very dear.
We are unable to work on any of our large projects. We have no idea when the pool guys are going to start work on this fetid mosquito hole in our back yard — there are leeches in there, people! — we have to wait a minimum of two weeks to see if this ivy herbicide will save us some hard labor, and we have no idea when the water company is going to tell us where our pipes are so we don’t drill into our sewer line when we rent the power auger for the fence posts…
… or perhaps it’s not a matter of when but if. As I type up this blog post, I’m on the phone with the water company and it seems as though the Dig Safe hotline is overselling itself. They are saying that anything on our property is our responsibility and we have to hire a plumber to come out and find the water and sewage lines at our own expense. It would have been nice to have been told this three weeks ago, you know, when I first called Dig Safe and they said they’d send someone right out.
I swear I’ll …
Anyhow, we checked into goats again. Someone in Brown’s office handed him a brochure for Piedmont Goatscapers, a local rent-a-goat company, and a very nice lady came out to give us an estimate. Their written estimate states that we have a “heavy infestation of invasive species” and that removal of a 50′ by 20′ area will require “up to a 50 goat herd [and] 2 full time shepherds” for up to five days. Rraaah! (We’re getting viciously grumbly at the previous owners. The other day, Brown was slashing away at the vegetation and he found a rusty but otherwise brand-new ivy rake under the ivy.) Unlike the other company, these guys do root removal as part of their labor so it’s not just goats chomping away at the top layer and the whole problem returns next spring. If we do go with goats, it’ll probably be these goats but renting goats is, sadly, out of the budget today.
Especially now that we have to pay a plumber, too.
* The man refuses to post to this blog, despite my best nagging. I better step it up a notch.
Flying by night 
“and he found a rusty but otherwise brand-new ivy rake under the ivy.”
Sounds to me like the ivy may have actually EATEN the previous owner! Have you found any suspicious piles of bones lately?
Lovely photo of the rough green snake – he’s adorable and VERY useful. I bet he eats mosquitoes, too 🙂
The water department in the town I grew up in had measured drawings for almost every water service line in town. Some better than others but we had them. Maybe your town does too.
I know these drawings because I worked for the water department for 4 summers. We made them whenever we installed a new service. We used old ones to find shutoffs (curb cocks), water main connection points (corporation cocks) and the lay of the lines.
Lots of cocks and laying for a job that was not very sexy or as homoerotic as it might sound.
Sometimes, if we had to turn your curb cock off, we’d connect a neighbor’s silcock to your silcock with a rubber hose and yank the neighbor’s meter for him!
If you had posted this two hours earlier, I probably would have ended up at the water department. The plumber had already come and gone within an hour of putting up this post. Oy.