January 20, 2011 No Rest For The Wicked-Old-People

I am finished with my dentist trips to Mexico. Finally. I had to make one last trip yesterday, but was only there for about 30 minutes. The dental lab was so busy on Monday they couldn't get my work done. No matter that we have to drive about 120 miles to get there.....I was getting real sick of having to get up at five a.m. for the trip. Oh, I had the alarm set for 6:30, but I'm always so afraid I won't hear it, or the electricity will go off and the alarm won't ring, so I am usually awake every hour on the hour from 1:00 a.m. on. By five, I finally just give up and get up.

Now it's time to get the winter place ready to leave empty for the summer. The first thing that needed to be done was to butcher prune the palo verde trees out back. They are very old, and suffer from poor pruning in the past. Whoever cut them before left long stubs at every cut, and Mr. Granny does the same thing.....even though I stand below, screaming "Cut at the collar! Cut where the branches join!" He doesn't listen to me, so I will go cut the stubs back the next time around, at least the ones I can reach.

The big branches that hang over the trailer were the tough ones. We had to put boards over the propane tank and the lettuce bed to protect them from falling limbs. It was necessary to remove everything that hung over the roof, so wind blowing the branches back and forth wouldn't cause damage to the structure. Mr. Granny has had a terrible fear of heights since he had his stroke, and I just don't have enough strength in my arms to hold the chainsaw overhead, so he finally got brave and went up the ladder, while I held onto his legs from below. He only dropped one branch on my head, but I got him back later, when I sawed a big one off that was closer to the ground. He didn't even realize it had taken his glasses right off as it fell! He didn't notice they were gone until we were on our way back from the first trip to the dump. We just knew they had fallen off into that huge container, and would be impossible to find. Luckily, we found them under the branches we were loading for our second trip.

We do have some more pruning to do on the trees, but the landfill will only take brush on Thursdays, and we already hauled three loads up there today. And we are tired. Besides cutting off all those big branches, everything had to be cut into lengths no longer then 5'. It was my job to cut them to length after Mr. Granny cut them off the tree. Thank heaven for electric chain saws. I only lost the chain twice today.

In between pruning branches and trips to the dump, I stripped the beds, washed the bedding and hung it out to dry, and baked a loaf of bread. We didn't get a chance to stop for lunch until around three this afternoon, so that freshly baked bread tasted extra good.

That's enough for one day!