Love thy neighbor

I haven't updated in several days because Nut has been keeping me so busy! We ran errands together on Monday and Tuesday. I think that we accomplished a good bit, but one of the things on both of our lists was a plastic kiddie pool. No, you haven't missed out on anything. Laura is not pregnant, and doesn't already have a child. She needs a pool for her dog. Well we found some pools at the Athens Wal-Mart. The size that we liked was too big to fit in the back of my Explorer, unless we folded them! Could you believe that's what the guy at Wal-Mart said. Anyway I loved spending time with Nut and so did Micah! I promise you that every store we went into, we left with EVERYONE knowing Laura's name. Over the past 2 days I have probably heard "Aunt La La" over a thousand times.
This weekend was filled with fun and excitement as well. To begin the story I will tell you that although our house has gotten a bit small for us since the addition of Micah, our lot is perfect. We sit on just over an acre and a half and back up to woods. We have trees in our yard! How many people can say that now days? Well we have (had) a HUGE Oak tree in our side yard. It was beautiful our first year here, but since then has died. The tree, as you will see later was split into 3 sections. I was so afraid that a storm would come and knock part of this tree onto my neighbor's house (it was closer to their house than mine) Every time the wind would blow, limbs would fill not only my yard, but their's too. Anyway, at one point in time we had some estimates for a couple of pine trees in our back yard. We were told $700 for them! This tree was way worse than that and was going to need an insured expert to keep the tree from hitting the neighbor's house. I know I have already told you how much we love our "Fruit and Bread" neighbor Cassio, well we also love our neighbor Randy. He was the very first person to move into the neighborhood. He knows everyone in here, and will do anything to help a friend out. In this case, we were his friends. He knows a guy who is a tree cutter (lumberjack) and asked his friend to come and take a look at our tree. The guy knew it would be a tough job, and said that on a perfect weather day it would be $700, on a not so perfect day it would be $1000.... just to land the tree!! That doesn't include cleaning it up! Long story short, we worked out a deal with Steve, (tree cutter) and Randy. Randy has been laid off since last October and needs work, Steve was very kind to help us and Randy out! The way this deal works was Steve cut down the tree for (get this) FREE while we pay Randy for cutting it into smaller pieces and cleaning it up.
Now, we could have done this ourselves. Stacy has a chainsaw, and we don't really mind the work, but Randy got us this AWESOME deal, so the least we could do was give him all of the wood and pay him some money to help with his bills! Look at this tree!