A Really Fake Tree

Keith brought home a surprise for me last night, the little red Christmas tree that was only $20.00 at walmart. A very nice little fake bright red tree that was ONLY TWENTY DOLLARS!! And it's prelit so you don't even have to buy lights. And, the cord the lights are on is RED to match the tree-how cool is that?



Now, this box is small and only weighs maybe 2 pounds, so I had to laugh at the 'team lift' label on the box. As a former walmart worker, these labels mean that you are not supposed to attempt to lift these boxes without getting someone to help you. Like you could ever find a willing fellow walmart employee to help you lift-get real already! So, of course I had to ask him if he got somebody to help him carry the box to the checkout.



The cats were of course totally fascinated with this new big cat toy that we put on the table. Tastes good, too.



Nomnomnom...

There are no ornaments on the tree yet. We don't know where our ornaments are and I think what we have is glass anyway, so we went back to walmart and got some plastic ornaments that we'll put on the tree as soon as we find some string. We don't really want to use ornament hooks in case the cats try to eat them.

Yikes!

Yesterday it was really really really really really windy. So windy that what I thought were brown clouds in the sky were in reality dust clouds (think of those pictures of Oklahoma farms during the Dust Bowl days in the depression). It was so windy that I had to shut all the windows because I could taste the dirt that was blowing in. It was so windy that I heard a big C-R-A-C-K and looked out of the window just in time to see our tree falling down. Well, not quite all of the tree, but half of it!

This is our lovely tree BEFORE:

And this is AFTER:


And this is what our house looked like from the street:


Yes, there is a house behind all that tree.

I called Keith at work to give him the heads up so that he wouldn't have a heart attack when he came home and saw our yard full of tree, and he says he'll have to go buy a chain saw to chop it all up, and he needed a chain saw anyway because, well, doesn't every household need a chain saw?

While waiting for him to get home I had a brilliant idea. Why not call some tree guys to come and clean it all up for us? So, when he got home I started calling around and within about half an hour we had the foreman in our yard quoting us $400.00 to have his crew chop it all up, cut down the tree, remove the stump, and haul it all away. The tree was a goner, too dangerous to leave up. Well, $400.00 seemed like a reasonable price considering that it would have taken Keith the entire weekend to chop up all the tree branches, chop down the rest of the tree, and then figure out how to haul it all away, not to mention the dump fees and the gas to make dozens of trips to the dump.

So, about 15 minutes later, here comes a small truck with two guys who start chainsawing up the branches and piling them up.


And then along comes a HUGE truck.


That has a huge scooper thing in the middle of it.


That scoops everything up and dumps it in the truck. Cool! The little boy next door thought it was pretty cool, too.


And, then it was time to chop down the rest of the tree.

There it goes.


The tree is down. That's Keith supervising there.


More scooping.


And no more tree. Just a few stray leaves to remind us of what was.

The whole process took less than an hour.

So, goodbye tree, goodbye shade, and goodbye raking the leaves (not that I did that anyway, either Keith would rake them up or we'd just let the wind blow them down the street), and hello weird looking yard with a big empty spot.

Spring Comes Fast in these Here Parts

And goes away fast, too. We had beautiful 75 degree weather here yesterday and today it is in the low 60's and chilly out there. Okay, I know it's still snowing in parts of the country but here in California we are spoiled and anything under 70 and we're freezing!
Our trees are shedding their blooms already-looks like it's snowing with all the little white petals blowing around.
The tree is almost all green now.
We went out for breakfast at Coco's this morning-yeah, I know, we eat out too much. Yeah, I know, we could eat at home for much less money. But, we are lazy and don't like to cook or go to the store, so...Coco's it is.
Of course, a big breakfast makes Keith sleepy, so...
Any time Keith is horizontal, Buddy feels like it is his duty to keep him company.