tcr25

It’s been a while since I looked at this, but the P3 is pretty much been stuck since last summer on the “figuring out what to do next” stage. The pond is filled; the patio is gone; the timbers and other trash have been carted away. Now we just need to bite the bullet and decide deck or not? Extend/reshape the porch to wrap around the side and tie into a deck? ... Or what?

All summer I’ve been meaning to get someone out here to look at our oak trees — we have three, including a big twin-trunk one in the back. At C—’s recommendation, I checked the International Society of Arboriculture’s search service and came up with a few names. It took me a while, but I finally set up an appointment for someone to come out … they never showed.
Fast-forward to today. Celeste and I were both napping upstairs; Evelin was reading on the couch downstairs (or so she claims … I suspect she might have been napping too). The doorbell rings. Celeste slept through it. I jumped straight up. I heard Evelin talking to someone, saying that she needed to talk to me.
I turned out some guys were doing tree work in the neighborhood, and wanted to know if we wanted an estimate. If they’d been selling encyclopedias or car-dent-repair services, I’d probably have said no, but I did need to get the trees checked, so the guy and I talked about what I wanted — diseased/dead bits out, no gratuitous thinning — and he gave me a price.
An hour or so later, he and the crew drove up and went to work. A few medium-sized limbs, a bunch of small things, and one very large limb later, they were done. They even cut down and chipped up the fig tree Evelin’s hated for years. (The stump remains, so I’ll have to deal with that, or we see if it regrows in a way we can keep trimmed to bush sized.)

The recent translation by Edith Grossman is excellent.