Reindeer Games.

I just finished giving what might be the weirdest housewarming gift ever.

Sally's former house next door is still going through throes of renovations. Last week, the dishwasher, and a bunch of old furniture, all got kicked to the curb. You can see an entire new kitchen from the outside. I'm still expecting it's going to be flipped, or maybe even rented out (I saw a "for rent" sign in the back of one of the trucks coming and going), but they're doing it quickly and putting most of the money they saved on the steal-a-deal into making it look good.

What didn't look so good, though, was a tangle of dead tree limbs that was out front, a foot from our lot line, for close to a month. They whacked Sally's beautiful but damaged dogwood not long after they closed on the house, and the remnants of it, looking like an orgy of reindeer antlers, sat there week after week as the town refuse department lived up to its name and refused to pick it up since it wasn't in a can or a paper yard waste bag.

Finally, last night as I put our own nasty gar-baggge out, I got sick of looking at it. The full moon made it plain as day that the losers in this game of chicken were Eleanor and me- and that if that pigmess wound up under a snowplower's iceberg, I'd probably find a way to trip over the damn thing in the middle of February. So I dragged the biggest of the limbs into our garage- Eleanor hadn't gotten home yet- and started taking a saw and bypass cutter to them.

Other than one cut through the biggest trunk piece, I didn't even need them. The tree was so dead to begin with, and had gotten deader out at the curb, so it mostly crumbled as I filled two cans with it.  I hauled them out with our own stuff, leaving the other half for today.

Or not. Because just now, the town emptied our cans, saw the rest, probably put two and two together, and a civil servant actually bent over for us (as opposed to how that usually goes) and cleared away the rest of it.

Win.

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In other win news: you may think I'm fudging those on-the-button word counts I'm posting. Mostly, I am- if I'm five words short or three over, I edit teenies and tinies.

Not this time. I swear I am not making this up:



I may knock off the rest of it today. On time and on budget, man.