Boy-Z

That's how the locals say it. According to my atlas it is boy-see.

It is going to be months until we get this place put together. The smaller bedrooms are causing me grief. None of our furniture fits like I would like. Poor Jared has been moving dressors from room to room for me to see where they'll work out. Our fabulous "queen bed in Rachel's room" project is not working out so well either. This is a house for 2 big people only...in the master.

I've got one more option I'm going to try and then we will have exhausted all our ideas. So the Queen bed may be headed for the spare room--which I don't think will be spare for long as the "3 boys in one room" plan is not working out so great either. I'm missing our Tomball house.

It will say that this is a much nicer house than ours in Tomball...nicer floors, cabinets etc...so I will try not to complain about the missing space we enjoyed there.

The gas and electric companies are supposed to be out today to mark the lines for us so we can plant our oak tree. It's still hanging on.

Did I mention my oak tree??

So we had this 100+ old oak tree in our back yard in Houston. It was a bit sickly from the day we moved in, but provided some good shade...and was the only one of it's kind in any one's yard in the neighborhood. Side note: the guy at the sales office when we bought the house joked that it was a $10,000 tree. We told this "joke" to someone who didn't get that it was a joke and over time had several people make comments about our tree we paid $10,000 for--comments alluding how stupid it was to pay that much for a tree. Silly people.

Anywho...every time a storm blew through it lost branches and each Spring we waited anxiously to see if it was still alive after losing all it's leaves in the winter. Each year it came back. Jared had wanted to cut it down from the get go, but I wanted my oak tree.

Then one day in June of 2004 I was out back looking at my old oak and got a funny feeling. The neighbors were having a guy cut down a tree in their yard, so I had the guy come give me a quote to what it would cost to cut down my good friend.

So we did it. And here's the thing...when they made the last big cut on the stump at about 4 feet, we discovered that the bottom 4+ feet of the tree were completely hollow. Only about and inch of the outside of the trunk was left around it. And after the cut was made, THOUSANDS of tree roaches and carpenter ants bubbled out of the trunk. You could see the whole lawn moving. It was quite disgusting.

The guy looked at us and said that the next big storm that came through would have knocked that thing down onto our house (or the Christies)--and then it would have been the $10,000 tree--$10,000 worth of damage!

The next "big" storm was Rita just a few months later and I'm certain it would not have withstood the winds that came through Tomball.

So...now to my oak tree in Boise...

The Tomball oak did leave me some little babies in my back yard. I let them grow, so that I could re-plant them in appropriate places--like my yard in Boise.

Yes, we potted one and hauled it all the way here. Well, Kenny Christie was kind enough to dig it up for me... It had a front seat in Jared's car with me. It's still looking pretty good. Must have been all the singing and talking I did to it on the 3 day drive. I'll post a picture when it's planted in it's new spot...

Yes, I know I'm crazy.