TCOBaG – kNow ThiNkIng AllOwEd

Or, how not to spend a day off.

A short time ago I had a day all planned. The wife? Busy. Boys? At school… and then Bynn has a day off, the wife returns early and says, “Hey, nows a good time to trim those trees on the back of our yard since Bynn’s here to help.”

Help?

Cutting this stuff is good work, and I enjoy it for the most part. I like sweating and working and being able to see that you did something.

Problem is that cutting is really hard, but not even half of the work. After you cut it all, you have to pile it up, cut up the big pieces, chop the little things, sweep up the leaves, chips, and then bag them.

That’s days of work.  Turns out it was 21 45 liter bags of trash, too. Ouch!!

It’s all done and cleaned up now though.

Here’s what the pile looked like to start things off.

Here are a couple of pictures of two of my favorite guys. They’re my turtles, actually my boys’ turtles, but I take care of them, and they’re attached to me.

Maybe I am a little attached to them, too.

They’re a lot more fun than you might think. These days though the weather is warming they’re basking more and more and even doing it together.

Here’s a couple of their better poses

So, I had another bad episode with my jerk neighbor, well, the guy who owns the building next door that has the most unsociable tenants I’ve yet to meet in Nagoya… the gist of that story ends with me doing some more trimming on the hedges bordering my property.

While I was climbing around there I found a hornet’s nest. Well, technically the nest of several hornets

We’ve seen them around the garden for a while since last summer, but not that many. This nest looks likes there’s more than a few here…

Luckily these days are cold and they’re pretty much in hibernation mode. So, down it came… and out they go…

Here are some pictures. Sorry I didn’t get one before it came down…

For the past 2 weeks we have had a couple of visitors at our home.

My wife’s younger sister and her daughter, Jisu, who is 4 years old.

It’s a lot different having those visitors since we’re a male-dominated domain most of the time.

I can say that the boys had a great time playing with their little cousin, and I’m pretty sure she enjoyed the visit as well.

Bynn said he loved coming home from school and having someone so happy to see him greet him at the door. Hey, I’m glad to see him, too, but usually the first words out of his mouth are something he and his brother have been fighting about, so I’m obviously not as thrilled to see him every day as someone else might be

This is the second time in the past few months they have visited, but this time the weather was better, the boys had a little more time, and I think Jisu was a little more comfortable with them, too. I think that made a little difference. They really did enjoy playing together.

For 4 years old, she speaks very well, and a lot, but only Korean. That also made for some fun. I had to do a lot of translating and giving the boys vocabulary when they wanted to say something to her. My wife’s sister can speak Japanese, so that was easy for them when they couldn’t understand her in Korean. Jisu couldn’t do that.

It was very interesting to watch them all ‘talk’ and get to know how to communicate with each other as well.

Anyway, Saturday they left for home in Korea, and we’re sort of back to normal now.

Here are a few pictures of the send off. I particularly like, as a photo, the last one of Jisu and her mom in the bus going to the airport. (Uh, yes, sorry, but since my wife had work at the university, Bynn had a basketball game, and I had to take Ahn to squash lessons, we had to send them off to the airport by shuttle bus.)

I know it seems I’m on a food thing here, but really, it’s just a friend posted some pictures of her peaches she grew and it made me realize that some of you might like to see the blueberries we get from a little tree in the landscaping in front of our house.

It’s not a large tree, and there is only the one, but it bears a lot of fruit. I’ve trimmed it back quite a bit of the years, too, but it doesn’t seem to mind.

It gets a lot of sun being where it is, and you’d think that would kill off the berries faster, but they’re pretty hardy as well.

We have another fruit bearing tree (it’s an odd one and I only recently learned the name of it, and promptly then forgot – sorry) but the birds go crazy in it, and it’s really messy. It’s extremely messy considering it’s right in front of the door.

Anyway, here’s a small bowl of berries we picked today. There are many, many more still ripening on the tree.

These will be great on some cereal…