If Life Gets Any More Exciting, I May Explode

What a winter! First there was the Christmas sinus infection, then the broken rib, and now this.

As you no doubt know, I live near the top of a hill. You may not have realized without thinking about it, though, that that all the neighborhoods hereabouts are literally carved out of the hillside. Sometime back when, developers cut terraces into the hillside and built houses on the resulting level spaces. And so streets here tend to end in very steep embankments.

As you've no doubt heard, it's rained a lot here lately. Soggy, steeply slanted earth here results in mudslides and, sure enough, the very steep embankment at the end of my street is beginning to slip.

Here's what it looks like:




You can see the tarps spread over the hillside in the hope that they will cause any new water to run off rather than soak in, as well as the sag in the fence (near the top of the embankment, to the left of the house roof) where it has been undermined by the sliding earth. You can also see one of several tractors that have been feverishly digging away the mud that has already slid (at a rate, apparently, of about one inch per hour) and the rented moving van in which Russel (the unlucky owner of the most exposed house, who has lived here since the neighborhood was new) is loading his furniture in the process of moving away. What you can't see (in this admittely amateurish photograph) is the break in the vegetation near the top of the embankment behind Russel's house — a roughly four-foot (top to bottom) strip of vertical brown earth that shows not only how much has already moved, but also how much more below it has yet to come down.

I believe that my house is far enough away to be safe. But we'll see what happens over the next week or so.