I ordered over the phone and put on my credit card one of those huge dumpsters you see behind stores. Maybe 5 feet high or so. The waste management company dropped it off and later picked it up at Delridge for around 800 dollars. Carol and I drove down to Delridge on the Saturday when Dan, Dylan, Dave, and Dave gathered to try to pick up stuff from around and about on the property.
WB had three sheds and two of those had to be knocked down they were in such ill repair. They were full of junk. In addition to the tractor and the trailer previously mention, there was old cement mixer, the one used to mix up the adobe block, and more than one beat up and mutiliated wheel barrow and all sorts of other litter all over the place. The guys filled that dumpster right up to the brim and overflowing in about four hours. But it looked like they had only made a dent and the inside of the house was hardly touched.
But things were getting into shape for eventual sale. Suzi got a guy named Jose and his crew to come out and cut back all the brush a legal distance from the drive. I don’t remember what he was doing but he was out at Delridge one late afternoon and was attacked by a swarm of bees. This had to be looked into because Jose said he wouldn’t go back out there until the bee business was attended to and usually bees don’t attack people.
So I had Suzi call an apian—or bee specialist—who went out to Delridge and found that a swarm of killer or Africanized bees had taken up residence in one of the pillars on the wall around the court yard. We hadn’t seen them because apparently they swarm only at certain times of day, late afternoon, it appeared, and indeed they would go after a person en masse if disturbed. So the apian guy came out, located the hive, and wiped out the bees, lord knows with what.
I don’t know. I just hadn’t expected to encounter killer bees as part of selling the Delridge property. I had this quasi comic picture of poor Jose fleeing the Delridge property pursued by a pack of angry bees. I guess we stepped in just in the nick of time because what with the bees and the rats it seemed the Delridge property was very rapidly ceasing to be a human habitation and becoming more a part of the local ecosystem.
The picture shows that portion of the wall where the bees took up residance, in a pillar I believe either directly adjacent to or under the bougianvillea.
