We’re watching the Packer game today and it’s half-time, so I’ll make this quick. After the game we’re heading back outside to try to finish cleaning up from yesterday’s work. Yesterday I cut down a tree in our backyard. It used to be a corner bush, but it kept growing out of control for years, and became a small tree, too close to the fence, so we decided to remove it before it started damaging the fence. It was also making it much harder to cut the grass around that corner of the fence on both sides.

So we took the tree down yesterday, leaving just about six inches of stump. We actually wanted to cut it as close to the ground as possible and put our bird feeder over it, but while we were taking it down we realized there was a round wire bush guide on it that the tree had grown right through. I actually hit the metal rod inside the tree while cutting it down. This pretty much trashed the chain on the chainsaw, and it wouldn’t cut hardly at all after that, so I had to stop at Menard’s this morning and get a couple more chains.

We got everything chopped down to manageable size yesterday, then started stripping off and bagging all the leaves, to leave just kindling sticks and logs, which we should be able to finish up today, or tomorrow at the latest. We’ll keep the wood and sticks for our firepit, which we use often.

Our grandkids spent the night last night. This morning I asked Connor to help me with the new Mario pack that came out for Nintendo Switch the other day. I had started playing Super Mario 64 and was already stuck, at the beginning of the game, not knowing what to do, even though they give you a straight, simple clue telling you exactly what to do: “There are 4 rooms on the first floor. Start in the room with the Bomb picture on the wall first, which is already unlocked.” I searched and searched, but I’ll be damned if I could find it. So Connor (6 years old) showed me and I felt so stupid when he showed me… The door was right next to where the person is who gives you the clue! You can’t miss it. The problem for me was that it had a star on the door, which I thought meant you needed a magic star to get in that room, so I never tried it.

Connor said “You’re not very good at Mario games, are you?” I said “Well, you know, grandpa grew up with a lot of video games, but they were all more simple and straight-forward than this–games like Pong, Zork and Space Invaders… These newfangled 3D games stump me sometimes.” He just looked at me blankly and repeated “You’re not very good at Mario games are you, grandpa?” I dropped my head and just said “No.”

Now back to the Packer game.