We have a yard!

This was another one of those days I was just dreading.
First, because it's Saturday. When I started at Price Chopper five years ago this Monday, I was on a strict Monday to Friday, 7-4 schedule. This is all but unheard of in the grocery industry, where weekends reign supreme; more than once over the past half-decade, I've had to fend off waves of envy directed my way from hapless weekend-enslaved colleagues. Hey, I'd say. I never asked for this schedule. It just so happens that it works out best for my department. All the while, I'd be wondering when the axe was going to fall.
It's not as if I hadn't paid my dues. In the five years I worked for 7-Eleven prior to being hired on at "The Chop", I got exactly three weekends off. My boss even tried to schedule me for my wedding day...despite having been invited.
About two years ago, it was decided that I would start working Friday evenings, and I thought oh, no, here it comes.
My boss has never actually demanded that I work Saturday mornings. He's asked, nicely, and I'm not very good at saying no. Besides, it's extra money in my pocket. So I tend to go in two out of every three weeks, and spend four or (very occasionally) eight hours. I don't mind the work itself--I'm sort of on my own time, so it doesn't feel quite as onerous--but I have to admit, the actual getting up and going to work really bites. Particularly since I don't get home until sometime between 9:30 and 10:45 on Friday nights, and I'm completely incapable of walking in the door and going right to bed. Sometimes I'm lucky to be asleep at midnight...and I have to get up at 6:30 to be at work for 8:00 on Saturday.
Oh, poor baby, I hear from the sleep-deprived audience. Well...yeah. Even though I've let coffee gain a foothold in my life, I'm still a bear for my sleep.
Today was the standard Saturday morning: absolutely nutso. You couldn't pay me to do a full grocery shop on Saturday. Everybody else is already doing one. It can take upwards of ten minutes to get from one end of the store to the other!
On the plus side, the morning flew by. Then again, that just brought me closer to the afternoon...and the yardwork.
Those of you who have been with me since I bought this house may have noted that I've been bitching about the yard from day one. It's a jungle out there. There are so many trees that (a) half of them have been choked almost to death by the other half and (b) the odds of anything like grass growing are next to nil. So it's been weeds and dirt and brambles and mud and deadfalls and sludge and yecccch.
Have I actually done anything about the yard? No, I have not. Because that would involve, you know, doing something about the yard. Bitching about it expends a good deal less energy, and doesn't involve nasty things like chainsaws and their attendant bleeding stumps. I don't own a chainsaw for the same very sensible reason I don't drive a car or play Russian roulette.
Luckily, we have both friends and relatives who do own chainsaws, and who can be bribed to use them. All it takes is a few chocolate truffles, some chocolate chip cookies, and copious amounts of beer. Unluckily, as the putative "man of the house", I'm expected to chip in somehow.
One of those chainsaws--the pretty teal one--belonged to my brother-in-law, Jim. Jim is kind of the anti-Ken. Cutting down trees is child's play to him...if push came to shove he could probably pull them out of the ground all by himself, with one eye tied behind his back. Add a bunch of Coors Light into the equation and double the fun quotient! Jim brought his girlfriend Ally, and they were joined by our friends Craig, Lisa, and Sue.
The actual cutting down of the trees took almost no time at all. That shocked me, somehow...I was expecting it to take an hour a tree, minimum. Instead, five trees came down in a matter of about ninety minutes. The rotted cherry tree...gone. The four entwined apple trees, which never produced anything but wormy, gamey, inedible fruit...gone. Craig and Jim chopped everything up into truck-bed-sized bundles of brush, and Ally and I took three loads--surprisingly, only about a thousand pounds, total--to the Waterloo dump. Then they very kindly took away the leftover chunks of tree, which weighed considerably more than a thousand pounds.
A good time was had by all. Jim is a walking laugh riot, especially when buzzed. And our yard! It looks easily twice the size it did. Actual sunlight penetrates to ground level now. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine grass growing back there.
Thank you so very much, guys.