I mentioned gardens in my last post, and this is my ‘garden’. It’s a small back yard that we could do a lot of work in, if I were a garden person, which I’m really not. Although I say that, I have spent a lot more time out working in this yard than any other, pulling up weeds and trimming down branches, but it’s not a space we spend a lot of time in. We did have a lot of unwanted junk out there that we ended up bringing to the dump, which made it much nicer out there, although there are still two old bikes (one of which is not actually old, it was just not ever really ridden, but has been out in the yard for quite a while now so probably needs a good servicing before it can go out on the road). The other is an old bike of my son’s when he was smaller. The tarpaulin has largely perished. Against the fence that is a foldable table, we don’t really use that much. The thing with the orange net is a rebounder, useful for soccer practice, if we ever used it for soccer practice. It’s too big to bring with us, and our yard is too small to use it effectively out there. This is only one corner of our small back yard. Let’s not talk about the black widows. We have an understanding, I pretend they don’t exist, and they don’t get stamped on when they come out. There are a lot of them in Davis, but we aren’t talking about them. So yeah, I’m not a garden person, but I think maybe I should spruce it up a little. I have all these ideas, but I’m not super handy, or practical. But it’s a lot better than it was. A few years ago there was this massive bush, a tree really, sprouting out of the ground there. It grew fast, and had big ugly lemons on it, and its branches had these sharp thorns about an inch or so long that would go straight through your hand, and destroyed a few bike tyres. It grew high, right over the fence, dropping those big lemons with faces like Victorian thugs onto the path below. It took a while and several sharp cuts, but I defeated that bush, with my massive lopper and my sharp garden scissors. It remains one of my greatest victories. I put it on my CV. That lemon bush thing has never returned. There was another tree, an actual tree rather than an upstart bush, growing much closer to the patio door. It was ok at first and provided a bit of shade, but eventually it got a little wild, and started rattling against the windows. Despite lopping off as many limbs as I could, this one required professional help so we got someone out to take care of it. And I mean “Take Care Of”, I don’t mean we got someone to come round and give it a foot massage. That tree’s days of knocking on bedroom windows are over.