this fucking bastard

Guys it was a shit show.

Okay we've got to make this short and sweet cause I'm trying to catch a movie. Also, I've been working outside all day and I've been drinking for quite some time. Prepare yourself for typos, terrible jokes and a bit of unfiltered nonsense.

Alright disclaimers over, let's get this show on the road! Step 1: find an old, shitty, gnarly tree that hasn't been pruned since 1987 (check!) step 2 get your tools

For my tools I have my work gloves, things my mom brought over, and beer. Boom done. Next.

Ask your Facebook friends for advice on how to trim a tree, then completely disregard that advice and just climb in and start hacking at shit.

 

Alright, we're really on track here! Alright now it kind of looks like this.

At this point you may be thinking to yourself, "wow, I'm five feet tall, I have a four foot ladder and I'm trying to prune a fifteen foot tree with a pair of hand clippers. This was a great idea!" or something like that. But HAVE NO FEAR! This is when neighbors Joe (from this post) and Jeremy come to rescue you! They live in an urban area and have a chainsaw and you know what that  means- they are just dying to hack some shit up. Woop! Come on over boys, no milkshake required to get you in this yard!

Here they are successfully using the "buddy system"

This is them realizing that I'm taking photos of them and now there's a dog there for some reason.

But he's a cute dog so whatever, come hang out!

Alright, where are we now? I don't know we're probably done. Close enough anyway. I took a quick break to hack up the flower bushes out front cause if I'm not at a dead stop I'm in motion, right? Still haven't found that sweet spot. Also I don't know how to trim flower bushes. I don't know anything about any of this shit but the landlord cancelled our yard service so here I am.

Found some cool fungus, don't know If I have any fungus nerds out there. Maybe my brother Joe.

Oh, and at some point Alex came out and gave me this look.

And then proceeded to work on his succulent garden.

I don't know if you guys are aware but we are kicking gender norms right in their assholes. I'm like the drunk dad who has the brilliant idea to go trim the tree when I have no fucking clue what I'm doing while Alex purses his lips and says, "Okay Juli, just don't hurt yourself. Have you eaten today?" Like I'm pretty sure I'm going to be an awesome dad someday. Okay back to..... um.  Oh, the tree. Yeah it looks like this now.

Is that what it's supposed to look like? I don't fucking know. We have this big stick pile now too.

Oh yeah, guess what else? Remember all that scrap wood I took care of in my last DIY project? Well now there's MORE FUCKING SCRAP WOOD.

Why. The Fuck. Is there always more scrap wood? Is this a law of living in a house? Did somebody vote in some legislation at some point that says if you live in a house there must always be scrap wood everywhere all the time? I don't build things, I don't go to Home Depot. WHY IS THERE ALWAYS WOOD?? Okay I'm cool. Whatever there's wood. But THEN THERE WAS A CHRISTMAS TREE.

Also not mine. So I'm burning it. Except this is all I have to burn it in.

Also I'm really bad at building fires because apparently this is not how you're supposed to do that.

Well joke is on them cause after all the ashes blew away and didn't light the house on fire, everything burned pretty well and I was able to make quite the dent in the brambles that I had pulled off the tree last summer which was the last time I had the brilliant idea to hack at the tree without any actual tools or knowledge.

So at this point, I'm pretty beat. I managed to wrack up some cool battle scars to show my friends.

But really all I wanted to do was sit by the fire and drink a wine glass full of whisky in this lovely glass that my friends Melissa and Brian gave me.

So yesterday's post was really heavy and kind of blew up way more than I expected it to. You can infer what you like about my sudden need to do something very physical that I've been putting off for a while. I probably wouldn't even disagree with you. Cause sometimes when your head is a mess the best thing you can do is get your environment in order. Well, to the best of your abilities anyway.

Here are some bonus pics.

Juli out.