Graham Sedam Writes

Read Part 1: The Beginning   The second summer that we lived in our house saw us maintaining the grass, but also beginning to tend to the trees. I'm a big believer in taking care of the trees you own. We live in suburbia, and the trees don't respect property lines. Also, they can be a safety hazard to those present in the yard and a structural hazard for buildings nearby. We have had plenty of power outages in the neighborhood because people haven't done their part. Sure, some instances are unavoidable, but people usually don't take care of their trees because it's an expense that isn't "fun." One thing I didn't mention in Part 1 was that the grass being sunburned wasn't the only issue we came home to the July of that first summer. Before we could see the grass in the backyard, we saw a stick laying on our garage roof. The stick came from a cottonwood tree near our garage and was about two feet long and about two inches wide. It pro...

Tropic Thunder My wife and I watched the movie Tropic Thunder about two or three months ago. It's the second time I've watched it from beginning to end, with other times seeing different chunks of it. I think it's a pretty funny movie at times and is a movie that has a lot of good lines. It's a bit of a "dumb, comedic" movie, but sometimes, those are the best. Also, there are quite a few familiar faces for the public at large. I had referenced the movie many times to my wife in the past, so when I saw it on either HBO NOW or Netflix (I can't remember), and we were looking for something to watch, I decided to start playing it. It took three nights to watch, since I started it over a period of time that coincided with me going to work early the next morning. I think it's safe to say she enjoyed it, and now when I reference the movie, we can both laugh and be amused because she gets it. Life's more fun that way. Here's a collection of good...

The Beginning I've never been the type of person to put too much effort into a lawn. But then again, it wasn't until we bought our house in 2013 that I actually owned a yard. And to raise the stakes a little higher, we had sod laid in our backyard two months after we moved in. We essentially gutted the backyard because it was in a bad state of being. I still wish to this day that we had taken more pictures. So, after the time, money, and effort to get to that point, I didn't really want to see that investment go, um, bad. Before we had laid the sod, the backyard was just dirt, literally. A lot of work went into getting it to the point of being just dirt. We had to disassemble and remove an old and rickety swingset. We removed random bushes that had no rhyme or reason to their placement. We dug out a cement footing that, because of Google Earth, we believe supported what looked like a light pole. The neighbor behind us had and has a mostly forested backyard, and it had ...