I have a webcam/security camera in my window here and it sends me photos during the day when something triggers it. I keep it pointed to the driveway all day. Usually I just get photos of birds that fly by. Yesterday I got a picture of a hydro pickup. And today it came back and lingered for awhile.

I saw the man get out and walk to the hydro pole nearest the house with something long.

“OH NO!” I thought to myself, “We must have forgotten to pay the bill and those are wire cutters and he’s cutting us off!”

Luckily that wasn’t it, but we have new orange stakes around here.

My best guess is they are going to switch our hydro service down to the road. We currently have our power coming from a line up in the woods behind us that cuts across the side of the valley. It is completely overgrown up there now and would be a nightmare to service. We’ve been lucky there hasn’t been a tree fall across it because it could have been days before they fixed it.

Now we have an orange stake near the one by our house (that our yard light is on) and it says “Anchor”. I’m assuming this means a new anchor for the pole will go there. Since the line will come off the pole in the opposite direction the old anchors would be useless.

Maybe a 3rd to a half of the way down the driveway there is a pair of stakes. One says a 35 foot pole will go there, and the other one is for an anchor. The pole stake is right in the middle of our drainage ditch going down beside our driveway.

From there, I can’t figure. I can’t find another stake, so maybe it will cross the driveway and go down to the road. There already are poles and hydro going by the house.

Either way, I’m guessing we are going to lose a lot of trees. I would normally be upset, but, well first, we don’t own that land at all – the entire driveway and the steep slope from the front of our lawn down to the road is owned by the province. And because we couldn’t bring ourselves to cut any of them down, even though we know they shade our driveway all winter, keeping the ice and snow on it for much longer than anywhere else (most of the driveway faces to the north-west).

So we’ll see what happens. I guess since we don’t own any of that land they really don’t have to notify us. Although they will have to cut our power to switch the line over. I guess I’ll just keep watching for emails from my web cam software telling me there is someone in our driveway!