if a tree falls in the forest...

Time I would have spent blogging the past two months has been absorbed by cleaning up the debris of twelve 75 – 80 feet high black locust trees that were, in no particular order, shattered by lightning, toppled by freak winds, taken down for fear of them falling on my house, or the neighbor’s, because suddenly they were leaning precariously as the ground was so wet the roots weren’t holding anymore, blown over by Hurricane Irene, or toppled by the drunken moron my neighbor hired to clear their similarly affected trees and he forgot where one yard merged into another and pushed them over with a backhoe. It’s moments like that that I wish I had the conscious of a sociopath so I could run him over with his own backhoe and not feel any remorse. Alas, I am not a sociopath and would feel bad. But he would deserve it. Just sayin’.



Fighting with the insurance company to fix the custom built bench that one of the trees crushed, pay for the removal of trees that were hit by lightning, a point on which we disagree, though how they look at tree trunks that have clearly been blasted into pieces, have visible scorched marks and say it was wind damage I will never know, cover the cost of the half pallet of now crushed landscaping pavers in our yard that were to be used in a yard beautification project before the blasted tree parts landed on them, pay for the awning that was ripped off the back of the house by the same freak winds that toppled five trees, and cover the cost of the fence section that another tree landed on.


Building pallets of firewood that can be sold to recoup some of the costs of this chaos, such as the tree service guy who charged a small fortune to take down one tree because he’s a scumsucker before we found an honest tree guy not looking to rape people in an emergency, and the cost of tools needed to cut all the damn wood into firewood. There are 23 pallets and at least 10 more based on the piles of logs waiting to be chopped. Our son is getting quite the workout chopping all that firewood. The teenage girls I catch gawking at his well-muscled arms and chest can thank me later.


My husband broke my finger. Well, not on purpose and he felt REALLY bad about it when my finger got crushed between the piece of wood I was settling on a pallet and the piece he tossed onto the pallet. My dominant hand index finger. It’s really hard to type with an index finger with many stitches in a splint. It bled. A lot. When people ask what happened I tell them my husband broke it. It’s fun. It would have been funnier had it been my middle finger. Now I just have a weird scar running between knuckles.


My daughter broke her finger three weeks later when she got kicked in the hand by some kid in Gym while playing dodge ball. Who the hell kicks the ball in dodge ball? Seriously.


Swimming is taking over my free time and I never dip a toe in a pool. There was a swim meet a couple weeks ago and the parents (me) had to volunteer BOTH days. After two six-hour days on my feet I almost think it’s worth letting them keep the work bond check. Almost.


In between appointments with the hand doctor, who looks at my husband suspiciously, the kid's swim practice and karate, this stuff seems to multiple when I'm not looking:

Just one of many log piles.



We say lightning, insurance company says wind.