Oh, hi!

So I have this blog...What can I say - things have been pretty busy since I last posted. From Thanksgiving through the first week of January I took 15 flights through 7 different airports (that's 23 total airport visits for those of you counting), including the always exciting Evansville Regional Airport. Anyway, I am here for the foreseeable future so posting should maybe be somewhat regular (note use of qualifiers). How about a story?

My house has a wooded area behind it that is large enough to attract the occasional deer but not so large that it filters the noise from the neighbors' 4-wheeler course. I generally dump my yard waste (failed potted plants, weeds, etc) at the edge and usually drag my Christmas tree a bit deeper in. Earlier this week I was getting ready for work and saw a woman in my backyard hauling my tree out of the woods. I moved to the kitchen window and looked for some type of municipal vehicle (maybe yard waste collectors were really going the extra mile?) but just saw another woman standing beside a pickup truck with a trailer labeled with the name of a landscaping/gardening business (that I had never heard of).

The first woman drags the tree around the house and the two of them toss it into the already full (with other Christmas trees) truck bed. Then she climbs into the bed to pack the tree down and ends up laying down on the pile of trees like she is going to take a nap. Woman number two stands beside the truck and they have a full conversation while woman number one continues to lie in the bed. Um, what? First off, my tree was not visible from the road. They must have been doing some serious scouting to find it and the other trees they had collected. Second, why do they need it? I'm guessing maybe for pine needles but I can't imagine they would be so expensive that it would be cheaper for two people to spend a morning searching backyards for used Christmas trees.

I kind of wanted to go out and accuse them of stealing my tree, but thought better of it when I remembered my own leaf stealing experiences. Growing up, my family had a garden and compost pile and the trees in our neighborhood didn't produce enough leaves to keep them covered/fed in the winter. Mom would drive the van through nearby neighborhoods on yard waste pick up days and we would haul bags of leaves into the back of the van. As a teenager this was incredibly embarrassing - what if I see someone I know! We're stealing people's leaves! I'm sure we only did this once or twice but I still remember being absolutely mortified.