Summer on the Porch

 This time of year when the temperatures regularly approach 100°, my favorite time of the day is morning on the ol’ front porch. It really is spectacular. There aren’t enough superlatives to express how enjoyable it is. 

I have the sprinkler running in the yard, there are people playing Pickleball across the street, and all kinds of folks are walking or jogging by.

I’m sitting on the porch swing and there is a nice cool breeze blowing by that makes it quite comfortable.

Too bad it’s not going to last. The weather report shows a high of 94° today leading to a very hot weekend. 106° is predicted for Sunday. We’ll keep an eye on that and let you know. 

In the meantime, I’m going to sit here with my decaf Irish coffee and my newspaper and enjoy the day.

Shredded

After cleaning out the closet of the back bedroom, we have two beer case sized boxes of old bank records that we want to dispose of.

I called the bank to see if they had a free shredding day coming up…and they don’t. They referred me to the company they hire for the shredding but they have a minimum fee of $25.00.

I decided that my time isn’t worth that much and we have a little home shredder, I would go to work on shredding all that stuff.

You can only throw a few pages at a time through the shredder but I made great progress with a stack of old bank statements going back to 2007. Next I had boxes of old checks that I had to rip out in three small groups.

I set myself up out in the backyard in the shade of the Carriage House. Things were shredding along nicely for about 15 minutes and then the shredder shred no more.

I’m giving it a rest right now and we’ll see if it comes back.

Stand by!

Good news. The shredder came back. I’ve decided that the best way to do this is to take a break every time I fill the bin.

It probably doesn’t help that it’s going to be 100 degrees today.

Tree-Mageddon

We spent some money today.

We got a quote from a couple of tree services to remove and trim some of our trees.

We ended up going with A-1 Tree Service. Their bid came in at about $4,500.00

A crew of about seven guys showed up this morning and immediately went to work on the side yard. We had them remove a bunch of bushes and two large trees.

They were incredibly efficient. It really helps to have the right equipment. After seeing all they did, I think we got a pretty good deal. 

Here are a few more pictures.

They were here for about three hours and really tore through everything we wanted plus a few little additions. They had this great stump grinded that really ate up the stumps. I had them chew up a couple more that weren't on the work order and they only charged $50.

We kept the rounds from the Black Locust tree so we're going to have some pretty good fire wood after we have a splitting party later this summer.

We are pretty happy with the results.