Return of Still Life of Disturbing Junk!

With the tree out of the way and the ground ripped up, new disturbing artifacts from previous residents of 517 came to light. Remember what we thought was Ken but turned out to be GI Joe from under the front porch? We found his burlier cousin who went the way of the professional wrestling along with a gigantic plastic firearm in the backyard:

Joe seems to have met his demise in a more peaceful fashion than the B'ton Bomber:

This is the face of a man who went down fighting. Or doing other things we shouldn't mention on a family-friendly blog.

Like that tree from Avatar only smaller, dingier and filled with ants...

Woody and I finally saw Avatar last weekend. How appropriate to see a film entirely about a rotted out tree when we too had one in our backyard. Once again, James Cameron has tapped into the very essence of our being... Thank you, King of the World, for validating us.

We knew the tree outside the back bedroom had problems when Brian chopped off a limb only to be met with a swarm of carpenter ants:


Here's a closer view of the deathly hollows of our tree:


Yeah, not so much with the luminescent blue-skinned people. More with the gaping maw full of carpenter ants.

We had the tree pulled down on the cheap and took out neighbor Steve's fence, our wheelbarrow, Woody's custom made sawhorses and some new landscaping in the process. So much for saving some dough. It sat in our yard for while we worked hard, went to BBQ competitions and sundry dry academic conferences, but we have been whittling away at it for a couple of weekends now. It has been reduced to this:


It turned out that it was not a little rotten, it was a LOT rotten. Like, if the Avatar folks were Smurf-sized they could have seriously lived in there. Comfortably.


We generated a HUGE pile of sticks, which the city thankfully took away. Here is a smaller pile and the giant firewood pile that resulted:


(This is not near our house or anyone else's house, so no worries about termites.)

We are turning the very hollow stump into a planter. We'll probably later sublet it to little Navi if we're hard up for cash.

The muscles from Brussels

It's been a while since we've posted. We've either:

A. Been working hard and too exhausted at night to write
B. Been goofing off and not accomplishing anything

Take your pick.

While we've either been:

A. Been working hard and too exhausted at night to write
B. Been goofing off and not accomplishing anything

Madison has kept up her strict regimen of begging for food, whining to be pet and laying about aimlessly. She managed to shoehorn in some time to pose with a dish fixed for her by her in-house chefs: brussel sprouts with a side of floor dirt.

It kind of looks like a vegetarian version of that scene from Pulp Fiction. Or it's cute. Take your pick.