As I mentioned before, we went tree shopping this past weekend, buying four trees for our yard. Yesterday, we had them planted. Kelly and I are still marvelling at how great they make the yard look. What used to be a empty, grassy yard has leaves and shape to it now. We’re particularly pleased with how the maple looks. Already, its providing relief from the brutal afternoon sun, with the temperature markedly cooler in its shade than out of it.

Our neighbors have admired our new trees, too, which seems to be the start of a landscaping arms race. Hey, if it spurs our neighbors to plant more trees, we’re thankful for the competition. Adding trees to the sparse yards in our neighborhood would make a huge difference in the the appearance of the neighborhood as a whole.

Our huge back yard needs some additions, too, though we’re not too sure what to add there. In my mind, I’ve been reserving space around our existing deck to save space for a future, expanded deck. Any plants or trees we might add to the house have to work around these imaginary boundaries. I think I might be wasting my time with this approach, though, as no one knows when we may decide to expand our deck, if ever.

The tree planting was not without its adventure. Our planting guy cut a utility line when planting one tree. We were puzzled how it could happen, since we had the utility lines in our yard properly marked. The line that was cut was not marked at all. From the looks of it, it appeared to be an electrical cable: one for our streetlight, I supposed. A Progress Energy lineman came out and declared it a telephone line.

A telephone line? How did that not get marked?

After the lineman left, I probed the cable with my fox-and-hound set. Hearing no telltale telephone buzzing, I realized the line was unused. Curious, I hooked up another tool that measured wire length (thanks, Al!). The reading on one side of the cut was just 25 feet. Hmm…

Getting out my tape measure, I walked off 25 feet. It ended exactly at the foot of our mailbox! Aha! The line had been severed when the house was built (and the mailbox planted). The phone company left the dead copper in the ground and buried another line under the sidewalk. That’s the one which was properly marked.

An aside: I had called Bellsouth repair after realizing it may be their line. Upon learning we were not a Bellsouth customer, the repair rep refused to help me. “But I’m calling on behalf of my neighbors. Their service could be out now,” I protested.

“Sorry, you’ll have to go through your local provider, sir,” was the reply. It didn’t seem to matter that I was doing them a favor by reporting it. Nice.

If that’s the kind of attitude they have, I told Kelly, we were gonna plant the tree there anyway, outage or no outage. And we will.