Backyard Chainsaw Massacre

I love chainsaws. They make the cutting of wood very quick, easy, and almost effortless. You know what my favorite feature of a chainsaw is? Those little adjustment nuts that are on the side at the back of the cutting blade. They make it easy when you have to reattach the chain when you inevitably kick it off the blade by cutting. You hit one hard spot, and zip! Your chain's off. But thank goodness for those little nuts. If those weren't there, I'd have a heck of a time getting that chain back on, which would have made those 4 or 5 times taken even longer.

Seriously, though, it was a weekend where I was equally sick and sent out to work by the Queen, who needed a bunch of trees that had been annoying her removed from the premises. You see, after the big, nasty ice storm, there's debris all over the city, and there's to be a debris pickup sometime in the coming days to help deal with the mess. In response to this, we're not only ridding ourselves of the debris, but all the other unwanted trees left to us by the wonderful horticulturalist wanna-be who previously owned our house.

She loved her trees. God bless her, she really did. When we moved in, the front yard had seven trees in the yard along with at least one rose bush, five trees and 2 rose bushes along the front next to the road, and at least fifteen trees in the back along with 3 or 4 more rose bushes (and she even took a couple more of the rose bushes with her!). The neighbors called our house "the jungle" due to its over-abundance of plant life. The insurance company wouldn't even insure it unless we promised to clear up the brush next to the house.

At present, the back yard has four trees, the front has two, and we're going to move the rose bushes from bordering the driveway to somewhere else. I did fail to mention the two trees next to the driveway, but they're not moving yet.

Today, after this weekend where I didn't go into the world's largest retailer at all due to my illness (it was a legit call-in, I promise), I am really, really sore. My arms and shoulders hurt from using the "effortless" chainsaw. Actually, I used two chainsaws -- one gas and one electric. The electric one gave out when it (apparently) stripped a gear. Now the chain won't turn at all. The gas one was doing fine until I tried to cut down a tree in the back yard at its base, and it would cut through it. The Engineer supposes that since we're number three on the list who have used this chain, it is likely dull. Sensible, says I.

What is more dull than a well used chain, however, is waiting for a game from Gamefly. This service is very much like Netflix and Blockbuster Online in that it ships X games per month for any system based on how much you pay for it. But where in three months we'd get 2 per week, sometimes, with the other two with a killer turnaround time of three days between shipments, with Gamefly, we had reduced our subscription to one at a time, and in the month of February, got only one game for our money because not only did it take forever for a game to go back to the company, and forever for them to receive it and then ship another, but our last one got lost in the mail. So for what we put out to play five games over three months, we could have just bought a couple of them down at Vintage Stock or off eBay and be done with it.

While this isn't the worst deal we'd run across (after all, it would have been very cool to turnaround a game a week or so), it didn't quite measure up to the other online services such as Netflix and Blockbuster, which to me, was very, very disappointing. We figured it was due to them not having enough distribution centers or something, so maybe someday, if they can keep it going, they can get enough centers to handle shipping here to the middle of the country in a reasonable time frame.

The final word(s) for the moment: poop drama. That's right. Sassy Pants is still Poopy Pants. For the love of God, what is holding her back from that last stage of potty training? Shooting for diaper threats, but who knows if that'll pan out. We still have some diapers on the premisis, so fortunately we don't have to buy any, but I really want her to put that in the potty, and not in her pants. It's very, very frustrating.