Monday, June 11th

Yesterday I met a couple of friends for lunch at our usual hangout, Wine and Cheese (technically the restaurant portion is called Panache but we always call it Wine and Cheese). I always get the same thing, probably because there’s nothing in it I’m allergic to, and that which doesn’t kill me makes me happy. It probably seems, I just thought, that I go out to eat a lot. I do, but I don’t — I’m sure I don’t eat out any more than any other person, the difference is that I don’t stop at McDonalds. I might go out to eat once a week, and when I do I go to a sit-down place, locally owned, with great food, and then I mention it on my blog. I like to think that talking about great experiences I have can maybe drive a little traffic to a locally owned establishment; supporting locally owned businesses of all types keeps my neighbors, friends, and friends of friends employed. And thus ends our PSA!

Totally not related to anything else in this post, but sometimes when I sneeze (like I just did, not that you heard me) and Tiny Kitten is in the room, she will meow at me. As if she’s chastising me for not covering my face, or something. Hey, at least I turned my head, so I didn’t sneeze on the keyboard.

This is the 80-something year old (Laurel?) oak that our neighbor has in his back yard. It looks close to our house (the one in the picture) but it’s a good … oh, I’m not good with distances… about 50 feet off our house? About seven years ago, ish, he got it looked at by an arborist who said that he might have about seven to ten years left in it, that they typically only get to 70 or 80 years old. A few years ago he had some limbs that were looming precariously over his roof removed, but lately he’s been noticing a few things… like a distinct lean towards his house… and some splitting between the major trunk branch… so he thinks it’s probably time to get it removed, before we have a major hurricane and it takes out his house.

Wow, will the landscape ever change! It won’t affect us too much; we already have a pretty sunny back yard and our house faces east so it’s not like removing a tree to the south of us is going to do much. But his whole back yard is going to change. He’s been doing vegetables the last couple of years, container gardening in his front yard, which is very sunny. Guess he will be able to move that to the back yard in the spring!

The tree-lover in me is of course sorry to see it go; it has a lot of nests up in those limbs, and while I’m sure a good portion of them are the annoying squirrels that eat my bird seed, there are probably just as many smaller bird nests that I don’t see. And I’ve seen the woodpecker family eating out of some of the limbs, too (although perhaps that’s a tick-mark in the column of “why this tree should be removed: see bugs”). But the last thing our neighbor needs right now is a tree on his house. The guy just got laid off a little while ago, and both Tim and I know how that can suck. If a tree had fallen on our house while Tim was unemployed, that would have been it — we’d have to pack up and move in with his family in South Bend. So our thoughts are with our neighbor this week while he trades his monetary savings for the act of pre-saving his house. And now I’m thinking of Garp — “this house has been pre-disastered!”