Happy Mechanical Christmas

I commented in an earlier blog post that it has been a fairly dull season on our street. Our neighbors have not decorated their yard at all. It’s dark. I am not “feeling” Christmas – especially since the flu has been on the rebound. I spent yesterday in bed, buried under a blanket with the radio and my android phone for company.

In other ways, it is far from dull. On both sides of our house, the happy pre-Christmas season has been all “action.” Of the hardware store variety.

On one side is the home of a “big man” – who clearly is not at home these days, or he would be going crackers. He is on an overseas trip, one presumes, or at another residence. His humble neighbors (us), however, only have one home to stay in, so we suffer. Seven days a week (yes, Sunday mornings not exempt) we have endured a range of power tools. From hammer drills to saws to simple plain hammering, the side of their house right next to ours is undergoing a kind of demolition-and-rebuilding-from-scratch effort, it seems. In the initial stages this was accompanied by a lot of shouting, laughter and foul language, as the workers relaxed during breaks in the drilling and banging and thumping. Now, it seems, the pressure is on to finish the job by Christmas, and the shouting has thankfully stopped. All you hear now is the relentless power tools (last night, until around 1o p.m.)

Not to be outdone, on the other side of our house (west or east? I don’t know) we were rudely awoken at the crack of dawn this morning by the sound of a man beating the living daylights out of one of those horrible “strimmers,” on the street. You know, those things that sound like a thousand angry bees, that spit out stones in your face if you are not careful. Give me the sleepy drone of an old-fashioned lawn mower, any day. Like most Jamaican gardeners (yes, most) the gentleman deployed this machine with great enthusiasm, revving it up continuously like a sports car engine. This went on for at least half an hour, during which I prayed that the wretched thing would give up under the strain. But it didn’t. It kept on going. And going.

Strimmer Man stopped every now and then to confer with a colleague, also presumably on the government’s “Christmas work” program that takes place every year, which is supposed to put a little extra cash in the pockets of the jobless. Then he returned to his labor, crawling at a snail’s pace down the road. I suspect he was actually attempting to mow the concrete sidewalk. That’s certainly what it sounded like.

As I write, one of the other side’s wide selection of top-of-the-range power tools has started up again. Time to beat a retreat to the bedroom and turn up the radio, I think.

Roll on, Christmas Day! All is forgiven.

P.S. Another example of “Christmas work” in our neighborhood: men have been diligently painting the so-called kerbs on the main road a hideous yellow. At times the kerbs are almost non-existent, consisting of a little knob of concrete, like a broken tooth. But each little knob gets its own small dab of yellow.