What a Day...

Last night as I was getting ready to go to sleep, I noticed that the tree in front of our house was looking kind of odd. It was storming, so I waited a while to go and check it out.

Turns out one of the large main branches had cracked. I think it got hit by lightning. The whole thing was sagging to the ground.

I called work and let them know I had to take care of it. Cathy went ahead and went in.

I got the ladder and the chainsaw out and set to work. First I cut as much of the END of the branch off as I could, to make it so that the whole thing was a bit lighter. Next, I cut the branch off the tree at it's base. This is when the fun really began. The branch landed on my ladder. Luckily, I was actually IN the tree while cutting it. However, it made it so that I couldn't get down the ladder, so I had to jump out of the tree. I landed with my right foot right on one of the roots, and it hurt like Hell for a good long while. My neighbor came over and helped me push the branch off of the ladder. Go figure...the ladder is completely fine. It had a several hundred pound branch fall on it and nothing happened to it at all.

After I got it down, I set to chopping it up. I got it all chopped up and started moving it into the backyard. This is when my neighbor's wife mentioned that she was looking at plat maps and our shed and other parts of our yard aren't technically on our property. She only mentioned it because she knows the lot behind us just sold, and she didn't want me moving all the heavy branches there only to have to move them again in a few weeks when the new owner of the lot starts clearing it. I ran up to the assessor's office, and I'm not 100% sure if my neighbor is correct. The "street" is supposed to be 66 feet across. It's not, but that's what the city considers it. It's really only 21 feet across. That means that there is 45 feet unaccounted for, which is on each side of the actual road. So our property technically doesn't start until 22 feet away from the road. If that's the case, then all of our stuff is in fact on our property. If that's not the case, then our property goes back 150 feet from the street, and our stuff is not on our property. I'm not going to worry about it too much until the guy clears out the lot. If he comes and claims it's his property, we'll deal with it then.

So I got back and continued carrying logs and branches to the back yard. I hauled them all back there and got them situated. I was ready to be done. So I went back into the house.

When I got in, I realized that my wedding band wasn't on my finger. Apparently it had fallen off when I removed my work gloves. Problem? I couldn't remember for the life of me WHERE I had removed the gloves.

I wandered around the back yard for probably a total of 3 hours today...and didn't have any luck. I was convinced that I was going to have to buy another one.

My friend Alex told me he was coming over after he got out of work to help me look for it, and then Cathy was going to help when she got home as well. I went out one last time right before Alex got there to look, and what do you know...I FOUND IT!!

It was in a spot that I KNOW I had looked before. The only difference was it wasn't in direct sunlight now. I'm guessing that the sunlight must've been reflecting off of the ring just right so that I didn't see the first 73 times I walked past it.

So...like I said...what a day.