Wow

That's the only word I could think of when this happened:


On Friday evening we had a brief but intense storm with a lot of wind and rain. Shortly after it passed, we found that one of the biggest trees on our lot had fallen down and of course it had to be one of the two we had the hammock hanging on. Luckily, it didn't hit any houses or cars and the only casualties were a bush and three small landscaping lights of our neighbor's. I guess this is the part where we realized that we were actually blessed that it happened this way, instead of causing any major damage, which it definitely had the potential to do. A blessing of paying tithing, perhaps?


It left a hole in the ground, probably about six feet by eight feet and two feet deep. So Greg and I spent the rest of the night, until it got too dark, chipping away at the dirt that got pulled up around the roots. Here in Maryland our ground is clay, which meant it was really hard and dense and difficult to break down. It was such dirty and hard work. Carolyn "babysat" (put in a movie for her sisters) so we could get the work done. Here's what it looked like after all of our chipping:


The next morning Greg went out and bought a chainsaw and we got to work. We got our neighbor's yard cleaned up pretty quickly. My parents and our home teacher came over and later, a friend with a bigger chainsaw also came over to help (more blessings). By mid-afternoon we were left with this:


And this:


The rest of the tree we managed to discretely dump in our "woods." We're still not quite sure what we're going to do about that stump. Greg wants to become one of those chainsaw artists and carve it into a bear. I think we'll keep digging around it until we can cut the roots and then I'm not sure what.

Here's the part where I turned lemons into lemonade. We've had these stones in the back of our yard that I've been wanting to use to make a firepit. I finally put it together yesterday and not only do we have a firepit, but we also have seating for eight and plenty of wood to burn. Anyone want to come over and roast marshmallows?