I was off to a good start in early January. Then I somehow got locked out of my blog's backend. (insert inappropriate joke here)

So much has been happening. So much, and yet? Nothing monumental. It's been beautiful outside, and I've been hit with Fake Spring Fever. We've decided to finally tackle the yard as a start to what promises to be The Year Where We Fix Everything We've Neglected For The Last Decade.

Late January, we had the deck ripped out, once and for all. Goodbye, rotten deck. Hello, assorted toys, household items and beer cans from ten years before we bought this joint! Wow, nothing like seeing what has been lurking under the deck for the last 20 years to make a girl realize exactly how many happy meals her kids must have eaten to accumulate the amount of cruddy plastic toys that were unearthed as the deck was dismantled.

Also dismantled - my determination that somehow my husband should magically get this stuff done himself. No, we're hiring it out, and it is getting done all the way, by people who know what they are doing. Yay!

Today, for example, I had a tree service out here to cut down a particularly feral stand of Acacia trees that were leaning every which way over the fences and terrifying the neighbors. I got a handful of bids and picked the service that came highly recommended by my parents, who apparently know a thing or two, WHO KNEW. They showed up today and I went on my merry way, fielding emails and participating in a conference call when I heard some saws and some banging, and then something tractor-y sounding in the yard.

Wow, I thought. That's a big chainsaw. Except in order to get the trees out of the yard, they had actually removed a section of fence and drove a bobcat into my sideyard, with a wildly swinging claw attachment, presumably to drag out the logs. I am not sure what I thought would happen, but having a tractor drive through a hole in my fence was a surprise. Luckily, we'd already had the deck guys rip out the blackberries and ivy and sad bushes in the side yard, so the tractor didn't kill anything that didn't already deserve to die, but it was one of those moments where I just accepted that I needed to not look.

By the end of the day, the trees were gone, the fence was put back to rights, and the yard is no more of a hot mess than it was before they drove a bobcat through it 50 times. Hoooookay.