Long month - but I'm getting there! . . .

I'm actually going to get to retire at the end of this month! Hooray!!  Well - I'm HOPING I will.  My boss said I could, but I probably can't if my replacement is still having surgeries for her cancer.  Gees!  I sure hope not!  She's such a great woman.  I sure hope all is well for her really really soon -- and not just so I can quit either!   But I do hope I don't have to work any more because there is so SO much to do at the house and I never feel like messing with anything when I get home from work.  

We ARE having all sorts of things done at home, though, even now. Next week just before Vickie and John come down we're getting a new maid service to tidy everything up in our house. And since Abigail died last month, our one remaining kitty, Li'l Guy, has been brought inside and he's living out in the kitchen / dining room area.  We've had him since 1998, but unlike Abigail, he doesn't mess on the floor or anything like that so he can hang out inside for the rest of his life. We've put up a "fence" in that big 10-foot opening between the kitchen/dining room and the living room though so that he can't climb up on all the furniture and shed his hair all over everything.  But he doesn't ever even bother to climb up onto the dining room chairs as I thought he would.  I put towels on top of all of those seats and when I had one extra towel left I put that down on the floor below one of the chairs and that's where he's been sleeping ever since he came in there! Great! So I'm sure we can remove all those towels when the company arrives next weekend.   

And this afternoon those guys who took down the trees in front of the house earlier this year are coming out to give us an estimate on removing all the trees across the back edge of our property (so they won't fall on the horse fence OR onto any of the neighbor's trailer homes back there).  And we also want them to cut off the top half of those super-tall trees in the middle of the back pasture, many of which are close to the storage building back there -- not good in storms.

Here's a photo of the storage building in winter surrounded by all those WAY too tall trees! I don't have any photos that show them all the way to the top -- they're just way too tall. We want to have them cut down to just 10 or 15 feet above that building back there -- not 60 or more feet higher than that building as they are now!

And there are also trees over on the other side of the pasture --
also too tall (although you can't really see that in this picture).

Then here are a number of photos taken after Hurricane Gustaf that blew down a LOT of those trees back there -- but there are still LOTS of them -- you can see that in those two photos above that have been taken recently:

Here is a view of the space between the back horse fence (on the left) and the neighbors' fences (they're on the right about 4 or 5 feet past those big trees on the right in this picture -- you can't really see them in this photo.)  We put that fence so far up from the back edge of the property because we thought we would be able to ride our horses around the property that way.  But that area is FULL of both trees and weeds now -- we need to get rid of all of that.  But first those trees have to go.

More photos of trees that went down during Gustaf.

Here's a really awful mess by one of those trailers back there after the hurricane.  Their own fence and one of their own trees went down next to that trailer.

Here's another photo of that place from a bit further back.  You can see in this picture that the people living on the side of the back road next to our property live in trailers, but the houses across the street from them are new regular houses (there's one on the left edge in this picture.)

So anyway, we're hoping those guys who took down our trees out in front will give us a price that we can actually afford to get rid of ALL of those horrendously tall trees back there in back.  We do want to keep some trees so the horses will be able to stand in the shade, but they need to be cut back to about 20 or 30 feet high, NOT 80 feet or so.  That enormous height is just way too dangerous.