Look at my darling boy.

Not much going on here so far today. The black flies, deer flies, and horse flies are starting to get out of control down by the river at the farm, so alongside the tall grasses full of ticks, I’m going to avoid the lowland valley & river until that changes in the fall. Ugh! I hate when bugs buzz my ears, or fly directly into my eyes. Not a fan of that.

I did manage to trim the lilac back a good amount so that I can now cut the grass in the backyard without getting smacked in the head by low lying branches. My yard waste pile has quintupled though, so I’m going to need to find a way to transport it to the farm. It’s a bit of an eye sore piled up against the front fence. I also broke out my fan rake to clean up the hedge trimmings, so that felt good to do finally.

I do have my eye on removing two substantial limbs off of the big maple out front, but I’ll need the dump trailer to dispose of all the wood, brush, and leaves. It will also be a pretty involved undertaking as I have to be up in the tree to take it apart in manageable pieces so as to avoid damaging the house. That’s why I want to take them down, to avoid damages in the case of a major wind storm. No good trying to avoid one type of danger, and then foolishly introduce another via rushing, or incompetence. That’s not cool. No thank you.

I also took some limbs down that were overhanging the back deck, and some others that were interfering with the gutters. I’d love to not poke holes in our gutters with wind swept tree branches. Hard enough when they clog up with leaves. Let alone become punctured by repeated assaults in the wind. Those are the kind of expensive repairs I’d prefer to avoid if I can. No amount of spray on filler will help in that regard.

In other news I still do not have my Echo SRM-230 weed eater back from the service desk at Markham Mower. Those of you playing the home game might recall that I sent my weed eater in on Thursday May 21st, 2026 and was told it’ll be 1.5 to 2 weeks for it to get serviced. Well tomorrow will be 4 full weeks, so yeah. That’s happening. I hope to have it back sooner rather than later. They called twice last week, so maybe I’ll hear tomorrow or Friday? My fence line looks pretty bad.