Defective Tree

Yesterday I looked out my bedroom window, and was surprised to find that a large branch of the pecan tree behind the house had fallen. It was still tenuously attached to the trunk, but there was a whole lot of tree resting on the lawn. Bought a serious saw and went to work on it this morning. Of course the summer heat has finally arrived, so it was a miserable sweaty job. Most of the main branch is still dangling from the tree - I figured it was too dangerous to try and saw it off while overextending my reach from atop a ladder, and it'll probably come down on its own anyway, and it was too hot to keep hacking away at it...so I quit. 

Troy recently helped me dispose of most of the rubbish I'd collected over the past 18 months. We rented a U-haul truck and filled it with wood scraps and old appliances and carpet remnants and unwanted doors and cabinets and rain gutters and window blinds and other leftover trash, and hauled it all to the dump. The backyard looks much nicer without all that junk piled there.

Recently I spent part of an evening down by the pond. At dusk I watched the first bats appear...we got lots of bats in my neighborhood. Some were flying low, chasing insects to within a few yards of where I was standing (considering how many mosquitoes I was attracting this was not a bad thing). Don't know which bat species we have here, but saw one or two that looked impressively large...