Um....thanks?

Last week, I told you how one of the goals for our year was to remove this tree:

Fast forward to today and...

Here's another view, if it's not obvious what happened. Evidently, windy, wet weather has struck again.

It's concerning that yet another tree has spontaneously fallen in our yard, though fortunately this one fell in the right direction to avoid hitting anything. And we knew it was weak and sickly, so the fact that it had almost no root structure (or maybe there is some down there but it rotted at the base?) isn't that surprising:

Honestly, this is one more thing off our to-do list. So...thanks, Mother Nature. I guess. Now could some beavers come through and cut it up into pieces for us? That'd be great.

Seriously though, should I start being afraid of those trees in our yard?

Low Expectations

Oh loyal reader, the only one left. You may have noticed that the volume of posts dropped significantly after July. It's not just the posting - it's also the work around the house. What changed? Well to briefly touch on our family life, something I usually avoid in this post, our oldest stopped napping on weekends. That precious time was our perfect time to tackle small (or even large) project. And blog about them. But that is a thing of the past and we now often use that time to do non-house-related things.

And so with that in mind, it's time to talk about 2019 projects and goals, and we're keeping our expectations small. For example, it took us 2 months just to hang this flower lamp in the kids' room. It required finding the right size screw and using a drill. Not exactly challenging. But it's up, better late than never.

Without further ado, I'm going to cover our outside goals in this post.

Goal 1: cut down this tree:

It's pretty much totally dead and we're just biding our time until we manage to finagle a chainsaw from a friend. D is sick of cutting down trees with hand saws.

Relatedly, we want to get rid of this tree stump, or at least level it to the ground (you may have noticed these pictures were not taken on the same day):

 Ongoing goal: continue to combat ivy in all its forms:

Here's the view of our backyard again, so I can tell you about our unlikely reach goals for the year. D's next big "hire someone for a major home improvement" level project would be to convert this brick patio into a full on raised deck. I'm not convinced it's worth the effort, but I've been wrong before (it was also his idea to convert our 3-season breezeway into the sun room). We also really need to eventually try to create some kind of intentional garden along the back fence, instead of letting it go to seed every summer and fill with leaves in the fall that we're too lazy to drag to the curb.

Before I leave you, possibly for another month given my current blogging pace, I thought I'd share this lovely picture of the decorative grasses that really seem to have perked up since we planted them this summer.