Wishful Thinking

One thing I may have told you before is that I love trimming the trees at my house.

I absolutely have no real idea how to properly go about it, but I enjoy it.

And when it comes time to clean up the mess, I would rather do just about anything.

The first time that I trimmed the trees in my front yard, Match and Papa were there to help. And Match trimmed the shit out of my Palo Verde tree. I'm telling you, it was naked when she got done with it. I nearly cried.

But she told me that you have to think of what you want it to look like. And that if it spends too much time growing out, it won't grow up.

I took that to heart.

About two months ago I told Diddy that he needed to trim the Palo Verde tree in his front yard. The limbs were practically touching the ground. It was out of control! It was definitely spending too much energy growing out and not up. 

He was stunting it's growth!

This past Friday, Janiac was coming to town and I needed to get my guest bed back from Diddy's house. I thought that it would soften the blow if I trimmed his tree first.

So I arrived just after 6 am with my coffee, tree trimmer, and gloves and got to work. I figured that he would be getting out of bed soon, but I didn't need him to start so I got right to work.

About an hour in, I had filled the trash can with cut limbs and I was running out of patience.

And I only had about 1/3 of the tree trimmed. 

So I unlocked the door and went inside. SuperFan was going to arrive at any minute to help me load the bed and I figured that Diddy was up and showered by this point.

I turned on the news and he came out of his room. When I informed him that I underestimated the job and it was bigger than me, he said, "I told you so."

Then he decided that he couldn't live with a partially trimmed tree so he got dressed and we headed back outside to finish the job.

As we were working - me trimming the tree, Diddy cutting the limbs into manageable pieces and stacking them - Diddy commented, "maybe we should start a landscaping business."

About ten minutes later, SuperFan arrived and Diddy remarked, "I wish a Mexican would drive by right now."

(For those of you who don't live in Arizona, he wasn't trying to be offensive. He was referring to one of the many landscaping companies that are owned by Mexicans that do great work.)

We sent SuperFan to Fry's to get some twine for him to tie his bundles of trimming and some sausage to make us breakfast.

She came back, but the twine she brought wasn't really working. I had just finished trimming the tree and I was making a pile of branches for Diddy to cut up and tie when a truck and trailer and two Mexicans pulled up.

They stopped, rolled down their window, and asked, "You want me to do something?"

Diddy, normally one of the tightest people I know, said, "You'll clean this up and haul all of it away?"

The driver said something minorly intelligible.

Diddy replied, "Fifty bucks?"

The driver agreed and they got to work.

I walked inside to SuperFan making breakfast and told her the story. Then I remarked that I had been out there for two hours and they would probably be done in 35 minutes.

Twenty minutes later, we heard the blower start.

It looks like we wouldn't be able to work fast enough to make our landscaping business profitable.