Tumbling Into Oblivion

… so I fell in a sinkhole yesterday.

No really. Not my pathetic melancholy mood, an ACTUAL sinkhole. I was just standing in the yard, talking to one of my clients when I shifted my weight from my right foot to my left and WHOOSH. Suddenly I was knee-deep in the earth.

Sinkhole
This is what it looked like after I fell into it. No big deal, right?
Sinkhole
This is what it looked like when I cleared all the unsupported lawn away from it. It’s about 12″x18″, definitely big enough for idk, a small dog or toddler to fall all the way in.
Sinkhole
I stuck a 54″ length of pvc pipe it to test the depth. It goes down on an angle, and that light grey object to the left of my pipe is an actual pipe. And below that?
Sinkhole
Blackness! And you can’t really see it, but running water. GREAT.
Sinkhole
Here I am holding the pipe right at the place where it stuck out of the sinkhole. All the rest of the length, almost 50″, was in the ground. Again, FULLY BIG ENOUGH FOR A SMALL DOG OR TODDLER TO BE SWALLOWED UP.

The best part is this is the second time this has happened this summer. Okay, last time I didn’t fall in, I knew that area was unstable and prone to sinkholing (it had collapsed and been filled in several times already in recent years), and when my neighbor left a hose running basically right in that spot for three hours I figured it might happen again. I was just probing the ground with my toe when it happened that time, and it wasn’t totally unexpected, but this time? Let me tell you, suddenly falling INTO the ground is very confusing and unsettling. I guess I should have realized the torrential rains the day before would have washed away all the dirt and concrete they dumped in there last time.

In non-being-swallowed-up-by-the-blackness-of-the-earth news, yesterday my birthday present for Taylor FINALLY arrived.

Team Zissou
Size 13 custom Team Zissou Adidas. Why does Taylor have such big feet???

Of course, his birthday was last Wednesday so I wasn’t exactly thrilled. I bought them on ebay, but I won the auction on July 16th, seven weeks ago. I knew the shoes would take time to customize but I figured a month and a half would be enough time for them to be finished and shipped. GUESS I WAS WRONG. But wait- it gets better! On Saturday, August 7th the seller sent me a message apologizing for the delay and saying the shoes would be shipped “early next week,” so like, the 9th or 10th, right? WRONG. When the shoes STILL hadn’t arrived by Taylor’s birthday I sent the seller a message asking if/when they’d been shipped, and the next day he wrote back saying after he got my message he stayed up all night finishing the shoes and sent them UPS that morning. WAIT. WHAT? So when he messaged me on the 7th to say he would ship them, not only did he NOT ship them, HE DIDN’T EVEN FINISH THEM??? He also had the audacity to toss a whiny remark into his message about how it cost him extra to send them UPS, oh gee SO SORRY YOU HAD TO INCONVENIENCE YOURSELF LIKE THIS YOU POOR MAN. Maybe he should have finished and shipped them when he said he was going to! Anyway the shoes are great but I’m pretty disappointed by the seller’s lies, excuses and delays. This doesn’t sound like positive feedback territory to me!

But let’s not dwell on negative, sour-grapey things like flaky ebay sellers and the crumbling yard. Instead, PUPPIES!

Georgie on Kichou
Georgie on Sleeping

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