Tangled in Vines, Trees, and Taxes

I know I haven’t posted in a couple weeks. Last weekend, I was back in Pennsylvania. My Dad had prostate cancer and had to get his prostate removed. Fortunately, the surgery went very well, there is no more cancer, and he is doing great in his recovery (even though the Steelers lost the Super Bowl!). We’re all very happy to have this behind him.

While I was away Chris did some furniture stripping and beer brewing. He also finished fixing the dogwood tree that split because of the weight of the snow. We hope it works because it is such a nice tree!


Since the weather this weekend was supposed to be warm – Saturday was in the 40s and Sunday was almost 60. We decided to get out of the house and do some yard work.

We started Saturday by removing debris near the fence line. The original owner had planted grapevines along the fence. She had not taken care of them for a very long time and they had completely covered sections of the fence.


Chris hopped over into our neighbor’s yard to cut off the vines on that side. When he did that, we could finally see the thickness of the vines – not easy to remove all this!


While Chris was cutting vines, I worked to remove the parts entwined on the wire. Each vertical part of the fence has vines wound around many times – removing them is quite tedious. Today, my hands feel more like claws.

Chris cut down a couple small trees. The first tree went down without any issues. The second one was another story. There was a small pine tree that was growing in a split in a maple tree. When Chris cut the base of the tree it just hung from the maple. We struggled awhile to try to get it out – push, pull, twist, cut, repeat. Finally, it came down but it was looking sketchy for awhile!



Saturday evening we decided to start some of our seeds for the garden. We started tomatoes, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, eggplant, some peppers, and flowers. We plan on putting them in my window at work because it gets the best sun all day (it worked well for us last year).


Sunday after church we went to brunch with Steve, Diane, and Jared. We had a really nice time – we definitely need to see friends more often!

After grocery shopping and a nice nap, we decided to get back outside. There is still a ton of snow in the yard but it’s melting a lot so our yard is an enormous mud pit. We’ll have to plant a lot of grass seed this spring.

Chris worked on pruning some trees while I tackled the jungle that is our front yard. The right side of the house has a bunch of huge, overgrown bushes and a ton of very thick vines. There were a couple trees that were so covered with vines that they fell over. It took a ton of effort to remove just a tiny portion of the vines. We’ll have to work more on that area later but now we have a giant brush pile out near the road – we’re pretty sure that all our neighbors hate us a little bit!


Sunday night we started our taxes – it may take us a little longer this year because of the rental apartment income. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.

On a happy note, I just got my new muck boots (just in time for the muddy spring!). They are black with little cherries on them – so cute!


Chris' parents are coming for a visit next weekend so hopefully we'll come up with a good project to tackle!