Our Bamboo Died in an Ecstasy of Flower

This summer, the bamboo, which enclosed our patio flowered.

To flower is a wonderful thing, a confirmation of life, however, in the case of bamboo, the buggers overdid it a bit.

Bamboo, when it flowers, it dies. One can only hope that they get their rocks off.

We now had a problem the sparrows didn't have -- they gorged themselves on free food, bamboo seed, just like sparrows should -- but we, the human overseers of this place we call "our home", had a problem. What do we do now?

What we did was hire somebody to take out the dead/dieing bamboo and build a winter garden where our bamboo encircled patio had been.

We knew, of course, that this would cost us a glob of money. That was no problem, in itself. I will be retiring soon and we have agreed that it was best to get obvious expenditures to the house out of the way.

What we didn't know was that a seemingly simple thing was extremely complicated. Well, it wasn't all that complicated essentially, but the guy we hired to do the building found/made it complicated...

They were supposed to start the construction the middle of October. The first person we saw came the first of November. He dug a hole in the ground and tore up the dead, dying bamboo, which we took to the garbage dump.

Then we waited a week. Finally, this carpenter came and began construction of our winter-garden. He was there two days and we waited and waited for him to return -- he didn't -- a week went by, two weeks went by...

Sunflower Woman called and complained and got a "well, yeah" reply.

Finally, a new carpenter appeared, we heard from him "o yeah", the other carpenter had gone to jail for something or other and that was why he never came...

But the cool thing is, we now have a winter garden! It cost us an arm and a leg, as they say in Danish, but it is so cool, we can already see how it keeps the cold out and, as an extra benefit, we don't hear as much noise from the street as before.

The bottom line is that, things happen, you live through them and you live.

As always, life is better than the other option!