TO TREE OR NOT TO TREE

I hit the jackpot this school year.  With nobody else catching the bus at the corner with me, the bus drivers were nice enough to grant my request that my kids be picked up at the driveway.  What this means, for someone like me, is that if I'm having one of those mornings and still happen to be in my jammies, The Professor can catch the bus without me and I don't have to fear an early morning kidnapper.  (Anyone even slows down near my kid and you'll see how fast a 41 year old woman can run in bare feet and tie-dyed pajamas.)

As I waited for the bus yesterday, however, I discovered that one of the branches of our tree was hanging pretty low.  It came to my attention when a bus passed by and the branch scraped along the top, making unbearable noises.  I got an image of some guy in one of those trucks with the huge tires suing the pants off me for causing damage to his roof.  I was leaving for The Professor's parent information night at school, so I left my husband in charge of getting that branch down while I was gone.

Let me explain something about The Vulcan.  He almost never leaves his home office.  Seriously, his kids suspect he's actually a vampire and sleep with crucifixes over their beds.  The Vulcan is monstrously good at his work and really not very good at anything else.  He buys tools, but then he never seems to know where they are when a home repair crisis comes up.  He has plumbers, electricians, and landscapers on speed dial.  If someone's computer gets a nasty virus, he's the one to call.  For anything else, check the Yellow Pages.

I realized he'd had no more success than usual when I arrived home from The Professor's school.  I had left with a low-hanging branch in my front yard.  I returned to find one that was now hanging perpendicular to the road and reached to within two feet of the street.  I found an e-mail from him asking me to call the city and see about removing that branch.  My opinion was that the city wouldn't do it and it was his opinion that it was causing a hazard to public property and it was their problem.

I called this morning and the nice lady on the phone said she'd look into it.  She called back 10 minutes later to say that it was our tree on our property and therefore our problem.  She was very nice about it, though.  With dread in my heart, I watched as The Vulcan got out the ladder and the big, long tree branch cutter.  My job was to hold the ladder, which he placed on a slope in the gutter so that it tilted at a precarious angle.  I said I didn't think it was a good idea.  He said if it started to tip, just hold it.

Let me tell you, that branch was a son of a b*tch to get down.  It was about 6" in diameter where it was cracked and required repeated snips from the tree branch cutter, which wasn't wide enough to actually get its blades around the branch.  The routine basically was The Vulcan went up the ladder, did a bunch of snips, descended the ladder, then grabbed the branch and went around in circles trying to make it give way.  (I helped by serenading him with "Ring Around the Rosy" and "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush.")  After 20 minutes the thing was barely hanging by a thread, but that woody thread was tough.  I suggested The Vulcan go up the ladder, hold onto the branch, and then jump from the top like Tarzan.   He merely snarled in reply.

After another 10 minutes of this snip and spin routine (along with my rendition of "The Wheels on the Bus Go 'Round and 'Round"), the branch finally fell with a crash.  Since this was the first manual labor the man had actually done in three months, I offered him the chance to pose making a manly muscle with the cutter in his hand.  He declined...and ran from me as quickly as someone can with a ladder in his arms.

   

FAREWELL TO SUMMER

Technically the season doesn't end for a number of weeks yet, but any parent (or student) knows summer really ends with the first day of school.  This morning I loaded my lumbering preteen onto the bus for 7th grade and an hour later loaded my second grader on another bus.  The Professor was droopy and draggy and still mumbling about the unfairness of school starting now.  Foghorn was cheerful and smiling and leaping and doing her version of Kung Fu at the bus stop (complete with bow and hands in prayer formation).  And I have hours of empty time.  Unfortunately I also have no clean socks in the house, an overflowing kitchen sink, and a dining room table loaded with unneeded school supplies, books, dvds, craft kits, and a kids' pilot hat.  Also somewhere on there is the electric bill which really should go in the mail today...




In honor of the first day of school, I give you...


THE 5 THINGS I'LL MISS MOST ABOUT SUMMER

1. The Kids - Believe it or not, when they're not fighting and not mouthing off at me and not destroying my home, I'm actually pretty fond of those two.
2. King's Island and Coney Island Rides - I'll miss you Adventure Express, Beast, Scrambler, and Tilt-A-Whirl.  Yes, Tilt-A-Whirl, I think I'll miss you most of all...
3. Sleeping Late - Never underestimate the power of sleeping past nine o'clock.
4. Staying Up Late - Never underestimate the power of knitting at one a.m. while watching television.
5. No Children's Activities - My children are far less scheduled than most of their peers with extracurricular activities, but nonetheless they have enough busy evenings during the week to get on my nerves.  During the summer we take a break from all that and I revel in the long, unstructured hours.  (Well, unstructured except for the structure I give them, but who doesn't prefer that?)

And it just wouldn't be right if the snark queen didn't also give you...

THE 5 THINGS I ABSOLUTELY WON'T MISS ABOUT SUMMER

1. The Inmates Sleeping in the Basement - They would probably list staying up until all hours watching Netflix in the finished basement and then sleeping there on the sofa beds as a highlight.  From the viewpoint of The Warden, who is trying to sit on the family room couch and do some meditative knitting, the constant screams and crashing sounds from below me start to grate on the nerves...especially at one a.m. (see number 4 above).
2. Sibling Squabbling - No, I have no fond memories of the incessant, nasally whine of, "Stopppppp!" from Foghorn every 10 minutes.  Or the constant interruptions to decide the remote control battle.
3. Sunscreen - From a cancer-preventing standpoint, sunscreen is one of the best things ever invented.  From a convenience standpoint, the crap sucks.  I'm compulsive about protecting their skin, remembering all too well those sunburns of my childhood where it hurt too much to wear clothing and sleep was impossible because I was burned all over as if I'd been rotated on a spit.  At the same time, I get so tired of smearing that stuff on, particularly with Foghorn, who resists the process.  It comes to resemble a greased pig contest.
4. The Total Lack of Silence - To quote the Grinch, "One thing I can't stand is the noise, noise, noise, noise."  'Nuff said.  If you need more info, see #2 above.
5. The Heat - I'm so not a hot weather person.  And I'm a big baby about it because I go from an air conditioned house to an air conditioned van to an air conditioned store, so it's not like I get the full fury.  I admit my whiny-pants behavior where heat is concerned, but anybody who has felt the humidity of a Cincinnati July knows what I'm talking about.  Then there was that heat wave.  Cincinnati tied the record, set in 1901, with 17 consecutive days over 90 degrees.  (We missed beating the record by one degree, I might add.)  I am, however, grateful I wasn't around in 1901 for that other heat wave, with no air conditioning and stuffed in a corset.

Yes, right now I'm enjoying this empty house.  (Well, it's as empty as a house with two cats, two dogs, and a husband with a home office can be.)  And I'm enjoying the structure of knowing when my hours of quiet will be (and arranging any work involving concentration accordingly).  It won't be any time, though, when the thrill of solitude will wear off, much as the sleeping late thrill did back in June.  Then I'll return to bitching about getting up early, dragging kids to activities, and packing those damn school lunches, not to mention the daily torture of homework helping.

But for this moment it's nice to hear birds singing.  Have they been doing that all along?