We had to remove my two weeping willow trees today.  I am not happy about this.  I've been fighting some type of icky cold for the last three weeks, so I missed a day of work on Tuesday and Wednesday evening I did not go to church.  I stayed home and lay on the couch for the evening.  While I'm just laying around an incredible storm came through.  I heard the rain beating on my window, which I never hear as the window is under the porch.  The wind was gusting and the rain was pouring and lightning was flashing and I was safe in my cocoon.

The man and I were on our way to work on Thursday morning and he jumps out of the car and says, "What in the..." and didn't finish the sentence.  Not knowing what what going on, I jump out of the car in hot pursuit.  Both of the willow trees are leaning toward the house.  These trees might be four years old.  They were twigs when we bought the house three years ago, but they are (were) taller than the house this year.  They are (were) beautiful.

Not knowing what to do, we returned to the car and went to work.  I called the local agriculture office to ask them what to do, and they told me to pull the trees back in place and stake them.  I share this information with the man and he returns to the house to see if they can be moved by hand.  They cannot.

We called in some of his family members to ask their opinion and we are told that the trees were not planted deeply enough and that the topsoil is sand so it isn't going to hold much. The offer to remove the trees for a cost, as that is what they do for a living.  They suggest I call my insurance company and see if my insurance will pay for some or all of it.

I'm not comfortable with calling my insurance company.  I've heard/read horror stories of people who call their insurance companies and then the rates go up.  I call my co-worker/great friend to get her opinion about calling the insurance.  She suggests that I do not call the insurance for the same reasons I named above and says that her husband will come and look at the trees because he does brush removal and he has a chainsaw and a tailor.

He came by this morning and looked at them, we put one of the trees on a chain and straightened it up and cut a few limbs off to change the weight of the tree and then decided that even with the topsoil that was purchased that those trees were not going to stay in the ground.

It didn't take very long, maybe 2 hours to cut down and load those trees into the tailor.  My tiny yard now looks like a big empty waste land.  I'm slightly exaggerating the wasteland, but not really.  Those willow trees took up so much space that it just seems barren now.

We kept some clippings and if they take root we will replant deeper.

My weeping willows were beautiful lush green trees.  I always used them as a descriptor on how to get to my house, and now they are gone.  I liked to sit on my front porch and listen to the wind rustle the long limbs.  It had such a neat sound.

That is the second thing that I've lost to the wind this year.  I had a porcelain windchime that the wind took this year.  I've had that windchime for four years and three of those years that chime was on my front porch at this house. 

They removed a bunch of trees from across the street (they were pretty close, it's a small street) not too long ago, I wonder if that has any link to the casualties we've incurred on my property?

I felt like such a bad person for taking the trees down, like I contributed to the lack of oxygen in the air or something.  I'm going to replant something, I'd like to put the willows back.

Okay, enough lamenting my beautiful trees.

I haven't done this in a while.

Random Overheard Conversation Bits:

"He's about as stable as a chair made of Jello."

"I think you could find better things to do with your time like banging your head against a concrete block."

The couple I tutor are returning to Korea.  The man and I had them over for dinner tonight and we played games and exchanged gifts.  It was a lot of fun.  I know getting into this that they will go home, and every time it leaves me with a great feeling of loss.  These are the first adults that I have tutored and I really felt a connection with them. 

Today I noticed socks. (This is not off topic, just go with me for a second.)  Koreans have great socks.  They are high quality and colorful.  The socks may or may not exactly match what they are wearing, but it doesn't matter.  Americans usually just wear plain white socks. I have some colorful socks, but they aren't as good as my plain white socks.  The colorful socks sometimes stick to the rough parts of my feet and I don't like that.  Yes, I scrub my feet and they are clean, but no matter how much I do to them, the calluses always come back.  Aaaanyway,  I was tutoring the boys and we were buying books online and the mom and I were sitting on the bed and I just happened to notice her socks.  They were pale yellow, with a few light green stripes and what may have been cherries on them.  They were very cute.  I commented on them and we laughed about American socks.

The couple I mentioned earlier came over, and because it is custom at their home, they removed their shoes when they came in to my house.  I remove my shoes at their home, and even though I've told them it is not necessary at my home they remove their shoes out of habit.  We ate dinner and then played Skip-Bo.  We were sitting on the floor and I noticed Julie's socks.  They were very cute also, they were heather gray, white and baby blue striped socks.  I told her they were cute and then, of course, the discussion turned to American socks. 

We decided that when they get back to Korea she will send me socks and I will send her dishwashing detergent.

You are probably thinking, "Don't they have dishwashing detergent in Korea?"  The answer is yes, but apparently it is not as powerful as American detergent.  "Korean soap is good, but sometime it leaves...(puts middle finger and thumb together and pulls apart repeatedly), um, thick... stick..." And for some reason I said, "Goo?"  Her eyes lit up and, "Yes!  GOOOO!"

This somehow relates, but I'm not exactly sure how.

My mom was a clean freak when I was a kid.  I was not allowed to have pets because they smelled.  I always wanted a dog, but that was never going to happen.  At some point the parents bought me some fish.  Unfortunately, the pet store people did not discuss the types of fish that could and could not be in the same tank together and so there were crabs fighting and eventually killing each other in the tank.  Then we got other fish, but my mom over fed them and they all died.  So there went the fish tank.  (The tank was in my room, but I wasn't allowed to feed them, nor clean the tank.)

When I was 9 or 10 I came home to find a small blue wire cage with a red pull out drawer on the kitchen counter.   I stuck my hand in the cage and immediately got bit.  Not to be deterred from having my first pet, I decided to rethink my tactic and instead of quickly putting my hand in the cage, I slowly stuck my hand back in the cage and pulled out a little sandy brown and white hamster.   He was adorable and sweet and never bit me again.  I named him Ricky.  Ricky was awesome.  I would tuck my shirt in and he would run laps around my waist and it would tickle and I would laugh and laugh.  We bought him one of those exercise balls and he could run around the house when we were cleaning his cage.  And the cleaning happened very often, because unbeknownst to my mom, they smell.

Ricky was a lot of fun.  He began to grow and soon figured out two things about his blue wire cage. The first thing he learned was how to turn flips on a wire that ran through the width of the cage holding the wheel in place. 

He would run on the wheel for a while and then he'd just do flips on the bar.  I was really into gymnastics at the time and I really thought that was the neatest thing ever.  The second thing he learned was how to open the cage door.

Imagine with me if you will, you are sitting or laying on the living room floor and without warning a little fuzz ball comes to hang out with you.  It was a bit of a shock and I'm glad that I never had experience with wild mice at this point because I think that would have really freaked me out.  We had to use twist ties to keep him in his cage at night.

We eventually purchased a really cool clear plastic cage and put a tower on it for him to crawl around in.

The other thing that I liked about Ricky, forgive me, and this is petty, he would bite my cousin.  Remember the one that I healed?  He did not like her at all, and every time she played with him he'd bite her. 

My mom told me that animals have a way of reading people and that if they didn't like the people that really told you something about that person.  Well, if you don't want to go and read about her, just know that she was often mean to me as a child and to me it just proved that even the animals didn't like her because she was so mean.  She is a nice person now.

We eventually got a playmate for Ricky and they had babies.  We would give the babies away.  I never kept more than a few hamsters at a time.

I had Ricky for 3 or 4 years.  Ricky died the day we were to move to Arkansas.  I woke up that morning and sometime in the night he got his teeth stuck in the wire that was under the cedar in his cage and he died.  I remember missing him very much.

He left an empty spot in my heart, but he has never left my mind.  I missed holding him and making obstacle courses for him and just the contact that I had with him.

It's an odd comparison, but I invest a lot of time with the people I tutor.  In a school environment people came to me and then went home.  In this case I go to their homes and become part of their lives and help them with American culture.  I know personal things about their families and their lives (it is good for conversation).  I have a heart for these people and I will never forget how much fun we had and I don't ever want them to leave my heart or my mind.

Today my boys and I decorated Easter eggs.  While many in Korea are Christian, and celebrate Christian holidays, they do not decorate eggs. (And I'm glad they didn't ask me what eggs have to do with Easter, because I honestly do not know the connection.)

I also brought them Easter baskets that I put candy, a hollow bunny, pencils, one of those boards that you bounce the stringed ball off of, and silly putty (it was in an egg!). I had some other things in the baskets, but they really liked the silly putty and their mom really liked the bouncing ball thingy.

So, to the eggs. We had one of those kits where you can dye and paint the eggs.  I brought paper to cover the counter and we covered everything and I explained how you could write on the egg with the clear crayon and how when you put it in the dye it would color everything but that part.  So I drew a flower and wrote Happy Easter and I put it in the purple dye.  I pulled it out and they were stoked!  They started dipping and painting and mixing colors.  I made the prettiest tye-dye egg and I forgot my camera.  Grr. 

They colored for awhile and I hear the younger boy start giggling and suddenly he says, "Engie, how spell hate?"

"Paul, why do you want to write Hate on an Easter Egg, Easter is about love.."

"Oh, I understand, but it too late.  I'll take it off."

"Sweetie, you can't take it off."

"But I will."

He proceeded to paint and paint and paint and paint until some of the letters finally disappeared.  He then tossed the egg up and broke it when he caught it.  Then he said, "Oh, that's okay, it was the hate egg."

We all laughed.

So after we were finished with dying the eggs, I sent the boys to wash their hands and cleaned up the table.  Then they ran outside with the eggs and somehow managed to lose three.  One was buried in the sand, and could not be reclaimed, one was lost in some mulch and I believe one was stolen.  The boys live at an apartment complex and one of the boys left an egg on top of an air conditioner and it wasn't there when we went looking three minutes later.  So I had to explain about not burying the eggs and how you had to remember where you put them.  I then sent the boys inside so I could hide the eggs.

I hid one egg on a bicycle and some in and around trees, rocks, stairs and tufts of grass, and then I went inside and told them to come out. They found half of them very quickly and then they really had to look.  I got questions like, "Are you sure you hid all the eggs?"  "Did you bury them or put them under the bushes?"  

"No, they are here, you just have to look slower. Do you guys know how to play Hot/Cold?"

They didn't so we worked on getting them hotter (closer) to the eggs.  It was very windy outside and getting cold, so when we found the eggs we went inside.  They had been running and laughing and were very excited about the whole process.  When we went inside the older one said, "That is my second favorite thing ever." 

That made me feel so good. 

Then he said, "Do you want to know my first? Video games!"

Easter Eggs rank high like video games.  That makes me happy.