A narrow escape from a horrible place!

As it happened, a social invitation took us to an unsavory side of town, so bad that initially the Phactor was surprised to learn we knew anyone who lived there, the Burbs! It was ghastly! First of all, it’s one of those places with a pretentious name, something like Eaglecrest, or Mountainview, or Cornrow, and only one of those has any relationship to realty reality. From the moment the car door opened, the monoculture of evenly mowed and neatly trimmed grass was over whelming, the waste of time and effort appalling, the peer pressure enormous. Trees were stuck here and there into this green carpet of turf like lollipops with neat little donuts of colored, oh yes, nothing natural here, mulch. And then the worst, all those poodled shrubs, neatly rounded, or sharply squared. Somehow a glass of wine found my hand; it was white, the wine, of course. The lovely hosts began introducing me, Mrs. Phactor being well known already, and in so doing said something to the effect that he, being me, has the most gorgeous garden. But compared to what? The whole development was just one step above a Walmart parking lot aesthetically speaking. Had the car keys been in my pocket, the Phactor probably would have bolted on the spot, and as it was, it required great will power to suppress the urge to scream and run, but holding out bravely, until about the time the smoked salmon was consumed, it being a necessary accompaniment to the wine, having had the wine choice made for me so the only correction was food choice, an escape plan was quickly devised, and with a thank you to our hosts, we carefully, least any harm befall us from gangs of roving lawnmowers and hedge trimmers, escaped back across the beltline into the safety and serenity of our urban setting. What a close call! The horror of it all still creates shivers.

Tree fall shows several kinds of strangeness

Dearest Mary forwarded this image to me surmising that the Phactor could best deal with the fundamental strangenesses exhibited. While somewhat uncertain whether this is a complement or says something else about my blog persona, this is pretty spooky. Firstly, who and for what reason puts a half sized giraffe in their yard? It isn't handsome and it isn't cute or funky, it's just strange. Now a cement hippo or 250 pound sleeping sow, that could be funky, at least we hope so in the case of the latter, not the former. Second, that sod is the stuff of lawn care commercials. It ripped up like old green shag carpet. Remember shag carpet? No, good, best forgotten. But thirdly, what the heck is going on with the surface under the tree and sod? Was this subdivision developed on a former airport runway? Was this a Love Canal covered with concrete to make it semi-safe for living upon? Six inches of sod with tree roots under the sod and neither could penetrate the tarmac beneath, so after all that rain, you do get the impression that it had rained a lot, a top heavy tree just ripped up the sod from the runway beneath. Actually another image does come to mind. Many, many moons ago the Phactor took a field trip to a quaking bog, a wetland where a more or less solid mat of sphagnum and vegetation floats. Not too large arvbor vitaes grow upon the mat, and if someone really, really big gives a jump, the resulting "ripples" make the trees quake, rocking back and forth. So this is more or less the exact opposite of a quaking bog, a solid rock bottom anti-bog upon which grows a mat of vegetation. Wonder what made it quake? Guess they should plant smaller trees, and get smaller lawn animals. Still another image is that the tree has opened its maw in order to grab some small person or large dog that has happened to walk by on the sidewalk, and the picture captures the capture moment, shades of some Harry Potter movie. Any other ideas? And even more thanks to Mary for sparing us the Joyce Kilmer poem that accompanied this and other tree pictures.