Money does grow on trees!

Side note here - I italicized the word "does" in the title using HTML! I am so proud of myself! I didn't use the "italics" key or anything (mostly because it doesn't exist for the title, only for the body of the post). Hah. My $17,000 Masters' brain isn't worthless afterall!

As I was saying, I made the discovery this past week that money does, in fact, grow on trees. I retrieved my mail one evening to find in there a rebate check from our local energy company. It seems that my energy use in the past year was so frugal that I had been overpaying into the "comfort billing" cycle. (I have a sneaking suspicion that overcharging, and resulting overpayments, are built into their billing system. That way they get a steady stream of revenue off of which they can collect interest before returning the original overpayment to its rightful owner each fiscal year. But that's just a suspicion.)

Oh well. I got my $200 back. How exciting!

I went back into the house. Setting the mail on the kitchen table with one hand, I opened the back door with my other. "Go on, Truman. Go forth and annoy thy neighbors."

I joined him outside, taking in the fresh air and beautiful evening sun. I looked to my right. My neighbors across the way were barbequeing dinner. I looked to my left.

There is a gigantic 15-foot tree laying across my yard. I stared at it for several seconds. Tree=upright.

I finally regained enough composure to call an arborist to give me a bid to remove the fallen tree. He came out the next day to survey the damage.

"Yep, you've got bores, that's for sure. All four trees are going to need to come out. See that saw dust piled around the base of the trees?"

I looked.

"That's obviously been building for some time. You haven't noticed it?"

"I thought that was just bark sloughing off or something," I said meekly.

"Bark." He looked at me skeptically. "You have realized that the trunk flakes off in paper, not bark, right?"

"So, how much for all four?" I asked, changing the subject.

"Fifty per tree, so that's...two hundred dollars."