A weekend catchup

I've been referring to this as the year of "guess what broke this time?" That's not quite true, though. It's not only unexpected things breaking it's all sorts of extra expenses, which makes it more like "guess what extra expense we have this time?"  

But before I go there, let me throw in a neat YouTube Short video I stumbled across this afternoon. It's about the Voyagers and presents a lot of fun facts.

If that doesn't work for you, here's the YouTube link itself. 

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The day got taken up with one of those "things we've gotta do" that ended up with some extra impacts, so to speak. We bought this house and moved in here in June of 1984. We've painted it numerous times, planted citrus trees in the backyard, then when a couple of deep freezes killed them, replaced three citrus with one oak - which grew so big that we had to remove it in 2022. The only tree we put in the front yard is a maple, which we got because I grew up in Miami and never had trees with leaves that changed colors. That was one of the first "home improvements" we did and the tree has stayed relatively healthy, growing a little bit every year. I'll hazard a guess the tree is around 38 to 40 years old and around 25 feet tall.

Within the last few weeks, I was looking things over with the aim of seeing if we needed to trim back the tree as hurricane season approaches. I was surprised to see a major branch that looked dead. Nothing growing on it. This tree is to the left when we go out the front door, and the branch is on the left side of the tree, so I'm guessing that's why I didn't tend to notice it until recently. Nine times out of 10 we're going out the front door, we're walking to the right because that's where the driveway is. I just don't walk over to look at the left side of that tree often enough.

After a bit of study, today turned out to be the day to trim back the maple. One of the things I had to do that didn't show up until I studied it a bit more was that there was another branch that was in the way and the whole task was a bit more complicated than just trimming back that one dead branch. Another issue was that the one I needed to cut was about 10 feet above the ground. To get into the position to cut that dead branch, I had to use my multipurpose ladder which has earned the nickname of the OCHFR or Overly Complex and Heavy Finger Remover. It was tough cutting that branch with my reciprocating saw standing on the ladder, stuck between it and the area I had to work in. At some point, the saw blade broke through into an open area near the center of the branch and everything went flying.

Long story short, I ended up getting knocked off the ladder and landing in the grass with the saw nearby but not stuck into me. I was able to get up fairly quickly and nothing seems broken, but I'm a bit more sore than I expected to be. So that's why the low-effort Saturday post.