Stump, fish... a busy weekend.

So, first let's talk about the stump. It's out! Thank God, the stump is out! This is a true Christmas miracle, and we have our helpful and handy neighbor to thank. I believe his name is Joe, so Joe, thank you, thank you, thank you! Doug and I would still be out there if it weren't for you.

I'll give a brief recap because I know that Doug will be blogging much more about this, most likely with a whole bevy of photos, too. Anyway, we got out there with the stump early, and quickly decided that the shovel, trowel, and keyhole saw weren't going to do the job. The stump had just too many deep, thick roots, and the soil was too rocky to get the shovel and trowel in deep. Doug called his father to see if there were any alternatives to chain saws (my father offered a saws-all, but we would have had to have waited until they came up again for that and we wanted this thing out). Joe recommended a grub axe, so off we went to Home Despot looking for a grub axe. We didn't see one, but we saw something in the axe department that seemed similar - a cutter mattock (which, to us, sounds much more like the name of a baseball player than a garden tool). So we put this cutter mattock into the cart (and as I'm driving the cart towards the register a friendly HD employee tells me, "You be careful with that thing," with no bit of irony to his 40-something year-old voice), along with a watering can and some batteries for photo documentation, went home and started axing. Here's Doug axing. We alternated trying to chop the stump to death, and realized that it would work, that we were making progress, but that the fence posed a problem (don't want to chop the fence up) and because of that we would be out there for years trying to work around the fence. Like manna from heaven, though, neighbor Joe happened to walk by with his little dog, Mason, and said, "So, what's going on here?" And the rest is history. He offered his help, got a pulley from his garage (he has a pulley in his garage!), wrapped it around one of our many tress, and after much sweat and a little bit of grunting, the stump was gone! Out! Yanked out of its hole. We didn't take any photos of the actual removal of the stump because we didn't know if Joe wanted to be photographed, but here's Doug holding the evil stump after it came out: Once the stump was gone Doug worked on filling in the empty stump hole while I mowed the (brown and dry) lawn with our reel mower. I rather like this mower, but I do think it will only work well when the grass is basically dead.

So that's the stump story. Another story from this weekend - the new additions to our Dedham family. No, sorry to disappoint, they're not cats (though in a moment of weakness on Friday night we were tempted by this fluffy gray and white kitty at Kitty City). We got 5 new fish on Saturday, three cory cats and two fancy fan-tailed gold fish. The cory cats are a little hard to photograph, as all they do is hide in the fish toys, but here's Stanley and the Cheeseman: Stanley's on the right and the Cheeseman's on the left. They are adjusting nicely to their new home, and Big Red could care less that they're there. This is better than fighting, though, or hissing or scratching, and so I think we made a good decision by getting some more fish and not another cat. One more photo of the new aquatic family for the road: