Fall (as in "on top of the house")

The past couple of weeks (and the next couple) have been a veritable cornucopia of strange occurrences and overcommittedness. Most importantly, however, was the quick progression from the lovely, gentle falling of newly yellowed leaves to this:




...treemasnowmageddon! Fortunately, we made it out with just some gutter damage, a seriously sleepless night of what sounded like bombs (crack! BOOM!!!!) hitting the brand new roof (followed by expletives and a full expectation of looking up and seeing the night sky), and a whole lot o' branch-hauling (made far more fun with a tow strap and Mr. K's new truck - thanks, K!). Our town actually decided to come through for its residents and is offering no-cost curbside pick-up for fallen branches. It's a huge relief because some of the limbs are so huge that the work required to get them to one of the chipping facilities would have been even more monumental than the task of getting them to the curb. We're hoping to save all those big trees we love so much and even more so, we're hoping to avoid having any of the number of large broken branches still perched high in our cottonwood falling on our beloved kids or pets. It's a good time to be an arborist... they should probably get together and book a group rate at some resort in the Bahamas because they're going to have the money and goodness knows they're going to need a BREAK after all of that work.

Do you feel like every few months you're reading about a fairly major repair/clean-up/project here at LocoHouse? Because we sure feel like it! So be it... it keeps us ever so humble and really, you can't fight Mother Nature.

Today the sheep are confined to the back yard to do their very best to eat some of the 9 million cottonwood leaves (one of their favorite treats) and branches that are still on the lawn.