Week 29 - Reading and Trees

Two things dominated this week - my neighbor taking down 2 70+ year old trees and me reading The Women. The first caused noise and then work, which I only accomplished after I finished reading the entire book in just over 2 days while working full time.

First the trees. I was working from home on Tuesday and the heat had broken so I had the windows open. Around 9:00, I began to hear chainsaws and looked out to see that my neighbor was cutting down the silver maple in her front yard, which was planted in 1951 when this neighborhood was built. I went out to chat with the tree guys and they told me she was taking out the back tree too. I was sad to see such majestic (and perfectly healthy) trees being cut down, not to mention the shade they provided my yard every evening, even though they're 2 yards away. By the end of Tuesday, the front tree was down except for the gigantic main trunk and I had hopes that they'd finish the back tree while I was on campus on Wednesday.

Nope. They could drop the front tree in the street but the back tree was between their house and garage so each branch had to be tied off and carefully lowered after it was cut so they were still at it on Thursday when I was back working from home. So noisy and it was still making me sad. All day long!

I had asked the tree guys what they'd do with the woodchips and upon hearing they'd be dumping them at the city burn pile, I asked if they'd leave some by the alley in my backyard, which they seemed more than happy to do. Well, at some point Thursday afternoon without making enough noise to get my attention, they dropped an ENORMOUS pile of woodchips. I'm talking enough for the entire neighborhood when all I needed was some to go around my veg beds. By the end of Friday, I'd spread mulch all around my raised beds and it looked great but other than one other bed, I was done and still had a mountain of mulch. I spread the word among my friends and posted on 2 local Facebook groups and some is gone but there's still plenty more there. It goes way back behind what this pic shows - 10 feet at least.

Now for the reading. Someone had recommended the book The Women and I'd reserved the e-book but would have to wait months or maybe more than a year so I also reserved the actual book at my small town library. I had forgotten I'd done that but when I went to knitting on Monday night, they presented me with it. I prefer to read an e-book on my iPad but picked up the actual book while having my tea break Tuesday afternoon and was immediately sucked in. When work was over at 5:00, I read until I had to go to a library board meeting and started reading again as soon as I got home. I read until midnight and when the cats woke me up at 5:30 on Wednesday, I read for an hour before I had to get ready to head to campus. I read all Wednesday night and finished the book on Thursday, reading during lunch and after I got home from swimming. Such an amazing book! I haven't read a book that quickly, while working full time even, in years. If you haven't read it, you should. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's about nurses in Vietnam during the war. Fiction.

So that was my week and the weekend was a Fremont run for spinning on Saturday, including all our usual stops, and chores, knitting and visits on the phone and in person (Lorri stopped in after church) on Sunday before ending the week in the pool, which makes me super happy. Another summer week in the books. Just a couple more before I retire and head to Rhode Island for my annual beach week. Not that I'm actually counting the days. Really, I'm not.