Playing in the dirt again

OK, apparently there’s some government conspiracy to keep my lawn torn con-damn-pletely up. It started last fall, when a county water line developed a leak under the corner of my property. After a couple days watching water trickle out of the curb and run down the gutter, I came home to find a backhoe parked in my yard and the street in front of my house covered with mud. And it happened just as the Zoysia grass was going dormant, so I haven’t been able to re-sod. There’s been a huge gaping muddy hole there ever since.

Then a few weeks ago we got notice that the county needed to do replace water lines leading to everyone’s meters, so last week they dug up the area between my meter and the street. And in the process, they drove something across the corner of my driveway and broke up the concrete. Normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal except I’m trying to landscape the flowerbed beside the driveway and I don’t want to go any further until they repair it (sometime in the next couple of weeks). At least they’re coming back to repair it, and this time they re-sodded around the meter.

Then Tuesday night, I came home to find one of these...

...sitting in my heretofore-well-established bed of English Ivy. Parked there. As in we’ll be back tomorrow to use this monster, but for now we’re just looking for a place to leave it overnight. Nope, it’s not on the big gaping muddy hole, it’s next to it. I mean, we wouldn't want to minimize the damage, now, would we? These are both on the front corner of our yard, and since we’re the first house in the subdivision¹, the gaping muddy hole and the barren ivy wasteland now compose the first impression for anyone coming to visit any of my neighbors. This particular bit of landscaping was done by the phone company², who drove over a landscaped traffic island causing more muddy ruts and leaving a trail of dirt on their way out of the neighborhood.

Ah, spring.

¹Which is not completely unlike being the only gay in the village.
²Why yes, that would be the phone company that I fired 18 months ago. No, no, this is the one we fired before we fired Vonage.