So much time, so little of it to blog

Had a tree guy come by the house yesterday to talk about taking down branches to open up our view of the lake. He also looked at a poplar out front, and pronounced it dangerous to the house.  His arguments seemed sound, and Mary's been wanting to get rid of some trees anyway to get more light on the house.  It's coming down.

Most impressive indeed* was the guy's get up. Long hair and beard. Civil War type leather hat.  Boots that laced up almost to his knee, with a knife sheathed in there for good measure.  Old school Chapel Hill, though he hailed originally from Western Massachussetts.

He liked to tell stories about jobs, in fact, it was difficult to stop him from doing so once he got wound up. He told us one about having to make it so water could flow through a pipe ("We had to get on that job while it was still dry, and the water level was so low cuz of the drought, you see") which turned out to have a big rock cropping up in it about  30 feet in ("there was no way anybody could climb up in there, so I figured the only way to take it out was to use a high-powered rifle.... So I put on a welding mask, just in case there was any blowback from in there, but I didn't pull down that really dark piece of glass, you know, just the inner glass piece so that I could see... with five shots we took about 12-14 inches off a that piece of rock, you know"). In any case, in due time, we got organized to have him come do some work.

 *Speaking of "indeed", Graham has taken to larding the word "indeed" into his discourse.  So we might ask him "Graham, would you like some soy milk?" And he might respond, "indeed."  Or he might say something like, "you know, when Benedict Arnold was talking to the Green Mountain boys about going up to Ticonderoga, they agreed, because, indeed, there was a lot of artillery up there to steal."  As you might have guessed, he has kept up his taste for the Revolutionary War.

He has, however, diversified slightly.  Last week, for writing homework, they had to write a sentence saying what they liked.  Examples on the piece of paper included "Jake likes bugs" and "Nina likes her puppy."  Graham wrote "Graham likes WWII."  There's nothing like a nice contraction to make writing assignments easier.