Day: November 9, 2013

What’s the plan for the tree?

I’m walking out the door for a day of playing Settlers of Catan (I know you are jealous) and I see that my neighbor has people doing work on his parking strip.  They’ve pulled out all the bamboo and have hacked off several branches from the Flowering Plum.  I figure they are just doing a rough cut for a rather aggressive pruning job and go on my way.

But when I look out the window the next morning, I find that the work appears to be complete, for there is mulch spread all over the parking strip, yet the tree has been hacked to bits, and still left standing.

What the hell is going on?  I hate flowering plums.  We have one in front of our house too. They were planted along the street when the Max line went in and you can see two on the other side of the street in this picture.   I think they are ugly trees, save for the four days in the spring when they are blooming.  I’ve wanted to replace ours with something more pleasing to the eye since the day we moved in. But I haven’t because it would ruin the uniformity.

However, I would never just chop it back like this and leave it.  It’s ugly.  Either take the tree all the way out, or trim it properly. 

Three sentence movie reviews: The World’s End.

I enjoy a few things about Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright films: they tend to combine genres in new and exciting ways; they are incredibly silly while also being a bit moving; and mostly I enjoy them because they are funny all the way through.  I saw the preview for this movie upwards of five times, so I was very familiar with those funny bits, and yet there were still more funny bits sustaining the entire length of the film.*

Cost:  $4.00 (though I spent another $5.00 for Kombucha on tap)
Where watched:  The Academy Theater (first time!) with Matt.

*One would expect this in a comedy, but it’s rather rare, actually.  Most follow the pattern of a bit of funny sprinkled here and there held together with vast swaths of not-funny.  It’s the worst when they’ve exhausted all the funny parts in the previews.