Every day is Arbor Day around here

In an attempt to purtify our place, we went down to the local nursey a few weeks back and ordered a whole slew of trees and climbing plants. After multiple phone calls to clear up the fuckwittery of our bank (which decided unilaterally to screw with the check that we'd given them), I feel very close to the manager, who couldn't have been nicer about the whole thing. What got me the most stressed was the thought that SOMEONE COULD BUY OUR PLANTS OUT FROM UNDER US. See, we'd bought them but lacking a forklift had to arrange for them to be delivered. The first date that would work was Halloween, which at that point was several weeks off. I was certain that someone would yank the "sold" sign off of our carefully-picked red oak and steal off into the night with it.

Then, I started stressing (notice a trend?) that because the trees were going in the ground on Halloween, some neighborhood trick-or-treaters would use the opportunity to commit a trick and carry off the trees. HA HA HA. The ten kids who came by our house (after four hours of waiting, poised at the door, ready to give out candy) could barely walk, much less haul off a partially-grown tree.

Anyways, the tree guys came and planted them for us. We had thought briefly about doing it ourselves but then sanity kicked in. You know how those women's magazines always list "plant a tree" as one way to get calmness in your life in only 10 minutes? How exactly do they figure that? Tree-planting is a lot of hard work - I could tell that, even standing by and overseeing the job. Gosh, do you mean to say that Glamour isn't right about everything?

This weekend The Texan and I do get the chance to get our hands dirty as we bought some wisteria that needs to go into the ground, ASAP. I'm hoping that my help will be more of the moral support kind. I don't mind working but the ground has bugs in it.

Oh, and that reminds me of a story one of my friends in the military told me. When she expressed a concern about the dirt she'd be exposed to during training, the recruiter told her that they sift out the dirt ahead of time so that there aren't any bugs in the ground. Hee.