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jimsjournal

We found a tree -- 12/13/09


If you have just wandered in from Holidailies and wonder who's who, there's a brief introduction to various characters at the end of this entry...

I've been thinking that I'm not really ready for it to be this close to Christmas. (In fact, I almost wrote an entry called "I'm not ready yet for Christmas.) This is probably partly due to a lack of snow (other than that little bit a week ago Saturday night), partly due to a lack of young children in the house (when your youngest is 24 you are way past the age of dreams about Saint Nicholas), and maybe partly due to the way each consecutive year seems to be shorter and to zip past much faster than years did "back in the good old days."

So many trees to choose from!

As we have done for the past several years, we went to The Farmer's Daughter's you-cut tree farm (actually, come to think of it, last year I bought a pre-cut tree from them at almost the very last minute, but usually we get our tree two to four weeks in advance). We've been going to The Farmer's Daughter since she opened a you-cut farm (not that far from her plant and garden shop). Before that we usually went to her family's farm in a neighboring town to cut our tree. (I guess you'd call that the farmer's daughter's father's farm?)

Jill did all the cutting this year.

We were under strict orders from Nancy not to pick as big a tree as we usually get. Jill and I love to get huge trees -- the bigger, the better. Our picks usually touch the ceiling (after I trim them top and bottom) and spread out and out, threatening to take over the entire room. (If I ever had a house with a two-story tall great room, you know I'd have to have a tree that was at least fifteen feet tall!) So we had promised to get a tree that was not only not going to scrape the ceiling, it was also especially not going to be as wide as it was tall.

Three wagons being pulled by a four-wheeled ATV. Our tree is on the middle wagon.

Back at the parking lot, we paid for our tree and had it baled in plastic string to make it easier to handle and to tie down on the roof of my car. Jill carried the tree to the car and, when we got home, she carried it from the car to our front porch. (There have been some years when we got trees that I needed help carrying.)

So now the tree is on our front porch. No time to put it up tonight. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Tuesday... but at least we now have a tree.




A brief introduction for those of you wandering in here from Holidailies for the first time: I'm just a middle-aged guy (but somehow I hit 66 on my last birthday) who lives in Rhode Island with my wife Nancy (a middle-school math teacher), daughter Gillian ("Jill" -- 27 yr old college student and baker), son Jeremy (24 yr old restaurant cook and part-time college student), and Tiger (senior citizen cat). Eldest child Adam lives in New York City with his wife Leah and our grandsons Sam and Milo. I'm a former programmer/systems analyst who got involved with software training and instructional design. For the past several years I have been working from home (you can't beat the short commute!) doing quality assurance and editing on course material for both classroom courses and Web-based training courses for a very big computer company. I've been writing this online journal since 1996.




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