Don't ask

Starting Week Four of waiting for our builder to give us the final quote.  In other words, nothing on the house-to-be is happening.  Nothing!  Well, actually, a few things are happening, but only by the sweat of our own personal brows.

Not that we blame our builder.  It's just that we happened to pick a bad time to build a house because we are in a house-building-boom and anyone related to construction is not that anxious to add to their work load.  Apparently, for example, the truss-building people are swamped and have not yet sent their quote to our builder.  "It usually never takes this long", we are told.   So it drags on.

We, however, have been working our little hearts out.  Our five acres is now minus 11 trees on or very near where the house-to-be will someday sit.  Husband in his safety chaps has been wielding a chainsaw and felling trees while I drag the limbs (not his, thank goodness) and firewood into piles.  We hope there will be no neighboring wild fires before we can get it all cleaned up.

One pile of many.

Upside:  I am excited about the firewood and about building our first fire in our wood-stove-to-be.  It has been 15 years since we've heated with wood and we've missed it.

Downside:  This whole moving onto rural acreage thing was supposed to end yard work forevermore.  The Yard Plan was to do what is called xeriscape, or in other words, pretty much nothing.  Except for a narrow perimeter around the house, leave the land like we found it.   Something one best not do in a subdivision if one wants to be liked by one's neighbors.

But lately I've been sensing local nervousness about the above-mentioned wild fires and reading too many fear-mongering booklets telling us to keep everything cleaned up and mowed.  So we may have jumped from the proverbial frying pan into the (wild) fire.  Husband is still holding out that, once all set up, there will be little to do, but I'm not so sure.

The property out here is covered with trees of one variety -- the juniper.  And I've decided junipers look nice from a distance, in a grouped setting.  But standing close to one of them and really giving it a visual once over ..... these things are not that pretty.  The fear-mongering booklets say to cut away any dead branches but that would take out large portions of nearly EVERY tree.  You've got to give them some credit for being hardy enough to grow in this sandy terrain .... but most are one quarter dead already.

So now that we are into June and the summer is well underway, I am wondering about what we will be in next winter.  Hopefully not the Beast again ..... because last winter and its ice storms wasn't fun.  We haven't planned on doing another southern escape like we did this year, but it may have to happen.  We'll see.  In the meantime, don't bother asking.  I'll let you know when something finally happens.  You'll probably read about it in the headlines.