No diet blogging this morning. I can't concentrate on anything except the crew that arrived at 7:30 to take down the two old box elders in the back. We've really enjoyed these trees for the past nineteen years and we're going to miss them. And the fairies that a little girl was once convinced lived in the gnarled old trunk of the bigger tree.

But they're short-lived trees and they've gotten dangerous. We realized they had to come down when one of the trees dropped a big limb in the April snowstorm and now conditions are so dry here that the trees are really stressed and likely to decline even more quickly. And the hard baked ground is perfect for the trucks to work on.