Trouble with Trees!

This is kind of long, but we've been having some trouble with trees lately. Actually I feel like it's just been one of those weeks where nothing's going right so far! It started on Saturday when I had to work all day. I was planning on using Saturday to do all the things I needed to, but then I found out my friend's baby shower is next Saturday (which I was supposed to work) so I had to switch. Then Sunday, after church the boys all went pheasant hunting. I got Easton down for a nap and went to the bathroom and obviously flushed the toilet. (Sorry that's probably as graphic as this blog will ever get) After that, I ran to look out the window because it sounded like it was pouring rain outside. But I quickly found out that it was actually pouring sewage in my basement. I called Tyson and he said he was too far away I'd have to call Grandpa.

Luckily Grandpa came and knew just what the problem was. You see, we have this enormous tree in our yard. Tyson's Grandpa's sisters used to live in that home. They never married and were both extremely smart women with all kinds of degrees. They were very picky about their trees. They bought this particular tree thinking that it was some fancy form of Japanese Elm tree or something like that. They would only allow licensed tree trimmers to touch it and made them show their paperwork before they could start. Turns out this tree is a box elder tree. We are so grateful for the shade it provides in the summer and I don't think our house would be nearly as cute without it, but other than that it's a problem! It causes box elder bugs to infest our yard, house, and cars and it litters those little helicopter leaves all the time. The roots of the tree are apparently a little out of control because they have grown into the sewage line somehow and that's what caused our problem.

So the plumber fixed the problem, but we were left with quite a mess. Luckily it only got into our laundry room and one empty storage room that both have hard floors. I was really stressed about dealing with that and preparing for a speech I had to give in my speech class (they make me really sick) so Tyson said that he would come home right after class Monday and clean it up. How nice of him. Well Monday at noon he walked in the door and said, "Crap I forgot I was supposed to work for Emily. See ya." And pretty much turned around and drove back to Orem. Anyway he got it cleaned up eventually.

But I'm still having trouble with trees. Only now it's the leaves. I've never been a good leaf raker because I have a problem with projects that can never get done. But then I saw on Good Things Utah that if you don't rake your leaves you will have mold, dead animals, and insects in the spring. I don't want any of those. So me and East took on the leaves.

We raked 7 piles in all and this was less than half our yard. See it's a never ending project. In the second pile we discovered that Good Things Utah was right! There was a dead mouse! After that Easton was confined to a blanket. Tyson tried to put the leaves in bags yesterday and it took 5 huge garbage bags packed full for one pile. So to do the math there are 7 piles- 5 bags per pile- that's 35 bags plus the rest of the yard! That's so not happening. I suggested we use the shop-vac. Any other ideas?