Category Archives: trees

trees, weeds

What I Did Today

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Today I decided to finish cleaning up all the volunteer growth in the back yard. With all the rain and cool weather earlier in the year, volunteer elms and sumac and weeds went wild. At the start it looked like this:

 
  
After a miserable day in the 100 degree heat, things began to look more presentable. Like this:
 
  
  
Now all that is left for tomorrow is chopping all the trees and limbs up and carrying it out to the alley to be hauled away. Sometime this fall it will be time to pull all the creeping vine and then rake all the pine needles. At that point it will be clean for another year (and we’ll be able to see the rock under the pines for a brief while).

I didn’t have to work alone today. Molly the wonder dog thought it was a good time to explore the forbidden side of the yard with me. (Molly is kept on the other side of the back yard and only rarely gets to run wild on this side.)
 
  
You can tell by her lolling tongue that it was warm. I kept refilling her water dish with cold water, so she had no interest in going back into the house. She wanted to explore worse than she wanted to be cool.

I did find some interesting things as I was bushwhacking. For example, the volunteer sumac was fruiting. (Looks a lot like bunches of grapes, doesn’t it?)
 

There were also some interesting sentimental things to be found in the trees as well. Way back when they were young, the Son and his cousin used to play in the pine trees, using cord to tie things in the trees, etc. Now all these years later, some of the cords are working free. I found this on the ground under the pine in the corner:
 
It’s mate is still tied to a branch up in the tree.

I’m tired and sore, so its time to go shower and then relax. So what did you do today?
couples, dog, marriage, Molly, park, trees

Sunny Day in the Park

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Remember the trees of green gold from a week ago shown in this post ? Well now that some real weather has passed through, they are starting to look a bit bare as you can see in the picture to the right and below.  Time to get ready to endure another gray and drear season before the explosion of green returns.

The temperatures the last few days have been getting down as low as 14 degrees at night, but today signaled the return to more temperate weather and it was 76 degrees this afternoon as Molly and I took our walk. You could tell that the cold streak had reminded everyone to enjoy every minute of this unseasonably warm weather – the park was full of people of all ages and types as Molly and I walked around. There were all the standard suspects that I normally see when walking in the park, but there were others I cannot recall ever seeing in the park.

 Having a friendly hairy beast like Molly with you in the park pretty much guarantees everyone is friendly and open when you see them. It seems like every pet we have had is a “oh we have to stop and pet this adorable creature” magnet. It allows a curmudgeon like me to appear to have social skills.

An elderly couple stopped to pet and talk to Molly. I was impressed with them as we began to talk and I could study them closer. They were in their nineties and had been married for better than 65 years. They said they tried to come to the park to walk each day if the weather wasn’t too cold or icy. In the course of our conversation, it became clear the gentleman had gone blind in the last few years and that the lady could no longer get around on her own without a cane or support. It struck a deep chord in me to see how they had adapted so that they could still walk together. The gentleman supplied his arm to support the lady and the lady supplied guidance and an ongoing travelogue of sights to the gentleman. Together they continued on their way through life. Having been married for 30+ years, I can only hope that my wife and I will be so fortunate in another 30 years.

At the other end of the spectrum, Molly and I ran into a young family. They had a young daughter (I’d guess somewhere between 18 months and 2 years from the unsteady perambulation) who was fascinated with the og (as close as she could come to pronouncing dog). Molly wasn’t quite sure what to make of this strange little person who kept screaming og at the top of her lungs, but was willing to get petted. Mommy and daddy were being kept pretty busy as the daughter teetered and tottered all around, interspersed with demands to pet the og and that daddy pick her up and give her a gee (piggy) back ride. Seeing young families like that makes me smile. I just haven’t decided whether it is a smile of satisfaction because I have already survived that stage and don’t have to face it anymore or if it is a smile of reminiscent envy.

Onwards – I need to get an openID server setup here to test some software, it shouldn’t be hard but it may be interesting. Besides, you noticed the lack of t e e t h in this post? Wonder if Google will?