This past week, I had a tree service remove the stumps of two old Oaks in my back yard. Abner has taken advantage of the enormous piles of chips that resulted from the procedure and has built two nests in which he gets all cozy and barks at passersby as if he is the boss of the world.

Today is Sunday and amazingly enough, my new lawn service guys showed up at about noon and spent 3-1/2 hours weeding and cleaning leaves and debris that the former yokels, about whom most of you know too much at this point, had left unattended since October. This was an expensive cleanup, but the place actually has a chance to look decent in a month or two. They are supposed to be back on a dry day this week to aerate, fertilize and seed, and this time, I have been promised a layer of straw over the seeded area providing the seeds a chance to do something other than wash away or provide feed for the birds. I have some degree of confidence in these guys though. They showed up looking like regular humans (I'm not sure that Bryan and his crew could have been described that way), didn't employ a riding mower (although, in fairness, they didn't mow) and succeeded in both unlocking and relocking the gate (a task that the previous crew never quite mastered). I am, as they say in the papers, cautiously optimistic.