Congratulations! It's a yard!

Well, I don't know when it happened but my identity as potential purchasing power in the marketplace transformed. No longer am I thinking... Hmmmm, I'd like to go to Loemann's and get myself a new skirt. I'm thinking, "We need to buy our own pair of loppers.""What's a lopper," you say? Loppers are an awesome yard tool that until last weekend I had no appreciation for. Way better than pruners, the blades on loppers come directly together when closed (not like scissors). As a result you can "lop" branches up to 2 inches in diameter. This came in very handy last weekend when Dima and I attacked the overgrown mess between our yard and our neighbors driveway. Gone are the days that I cruised jcrew.com in search of the perfect merino wool sweater. Now I'm scanning the pages of homedepot.com (HoDe as Dima calls it.) looking whistfully at loppers, flat hoses and garden bow rakes.Now, back to this overgrown mess... the retaining wall between our yard and and our neighbors driveway is slowly falling apart. Two plants, of unknown origin, had broken the brick apart and grown to be full sized trees. I say "had" because last weekend Dima and I pulled out a can of whoop-#@! and tore the larger of the two out. Man! Who knew I could get into yard work? This is where my appreciation for the wonder that is a lopper came into being. We made short work of this weed tree, as our neighbor Rich called it. We cut it out of the branches and from around the trunk of its neighbor. We pulled it's vines out of the ground and off of the fence. We kicked butt! Then we loaded up most of it's remains into Rich's pick-up and he drove it all to the dump, which was right neighborly of him.Rich and his wife Svetlana have been very neighborly. He likes the effort we're putting into our house, because, as he says, "The better your house looks the better it is for my property value." So, Rich has been using his truck to haul away our yard waste, the remains of the vestibule that we tore off the front of the house the day of closing, and the nasty water soaked matress and desks that the seller left in our driveway. What a guy! Svetlana has give us tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden. And early this week some fresh catnip for Melba. (Being the anti-cat that she is she's not quite sure what to make of it.)The long and short of it is that we like our neighbors. We'll see how that holds up as we deal with this retaining wall that the weed trees have busted up.