Don’t let the title fool you.  It is not Christmas, and that’s not Santa on our roof.  We’ll maybe it is, but she doesn’t have a bag full of toys.  Yes, it is Sylvia.

Yesterday, was wonderful and sunny.  I had noticed that in heavy rains, and we’ve had a lot of them lately, the gutter that runs beside the kitchen and dining area runs over with water.  That gutter needed to be cleaned and the rest needed to be checked.

Sylvia, the volunteer, went up that tower on the back corner of the garage and walked the roof to access the nature and scope of our gutter-cleaning project.  About 20 feet of gutter had to be cleaned.  I brought out the ladder and with that we soon had the job finished.

As we were finishing, Sylvia observed that the shrubs would soon cover the windows.  I promised to take care of the job.  A few minutes later, I had a pair of long-handled loppers in my hand and was beginning to work on the end shrub.  I have tried to keep the growth cut back with an electric hedge trimmer, but every year the top just seemed to creep up.  It would require major surgery.

It took a while with both of us working at it.  We got this far and then decided to continue at a later time.

It required some planning and packing to fit all the debris into the tractor’s front-end loader, but we did.  (Wish you were here Pricilla to help process those shrubs.  Fortunately, it looks like more rain today.  I don’t really want to prune another shrub today.