Landlord Chores

A tree came down in Jen’s mother’s yard. It was at least 75′ tall. A rotted cherry. Fell the width of her backyard. Luckily nothing was damaged, but it needed some cleaning up which was interesting. The entire trunk was covered with ivy.

It made cutting up with the chainsaw interesting. If you could see the trunk through all the leaves, you were lucky. There was an entire ecosystem living between the ivy leaves and the dead trunk. It was all kind of wild. I was going to cut it all up, stack it and leave it for the winter so the ivy could die off and make it easier to transport, but I ran into poison ivy near the bottom half. I decided to leave all that as it was until the spring. Let the poison ivy die where it is, then cut it up next spring.

I knew a guy once that cut up a tree in a similar situation. He was off work for a week with poison ivy blisters up and down both arms. I’d like to avoid that if I can.

With the tree work halted, we moved onto other things. We delivered a new mattress and box spring, so had to move the old one downstairs and the new one in. Somewhere in the switch we completely lost a roll of duct tape. I set it down, then it vanished. I think we spent more time looking for the tape than we did moving the mattresses. Really weird.

Then it was time for lunch, so we had a nice little picnic on the back deck.

Abigail wants to know why Grandma isn’t sharing. A baby’s gotta eat too.

After lunch it was onto the gutters. They were completely overflowing with pine needles and gunk. I hope the previous owner skipped a year or two and all that crap wasn’t just from this year. It wasn’t hard to do and went pretty fast, but there was a lot of crap in those gutters. Walking around on her roof made me a little jealous. Her roof is nice and solid where as mine has a little squish even after the roofers replaced a lot of the sheeting four years ago.

While Jen wrapped things up for the day inside, I started a little task I’ve been wanting to tackle since getting the house. The previous owners had a large fountain in their front flower garden that sat on a large concrete block. It looked like a section of sidewalk they had taken from somewhere. I’ve wanted to get it out of there so Jen’s mother could plant something nice. In the past I’d made quick efforts to move it to see how substantial it was and it was – substantial. Now I went after it with a sledge hammer. My sledge is something I found or picked up somewhere left behind, so it’s not the biggest of sledges. The first few hits actually bounced, so I moved my target zones to the corners. Sure enough within a few more hits, cracks started to appear. It wasn’t long and I had cracks across every corner. Prying away those pieces left new corners to crack off and haul away.

Not that that’s gone, I can remove it from the back of my “gotta do list” I review each night before bed. If only I could do that for the hundreds of other things in that list, I might get a little more sleep at night.

So that was yesterday. Today I head back to do some electrical work, repair one of the gutters (the one highest from the ground) and install some cat doors. All quick and easy tasks on their own, but will pile up quickly and take most of the day today.

– b