Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho

We've been working on preparing our land, which has really been great. With a ton of help from the community, we've been up there a few days and accomplished the following.

• Mowed the head-high grass with machetes.
• Knocked a beach ball-sized termite nest out of a tree.
• Picked up landfill volumes of trash. 
• Made friends with the biting ants multiple times. 
• Explained when we're building our house approximately 6000 times.
• Talked people out of "drying up" the remaining plants with some sort of deadly herbicide.
• Talked people out of "burning" everything on the property.
• Failed to talk people out of cutting down everything down that looks like a tree (including the only two real trees.)
• Had to thank people for cutting down our only trees that we loved so much for doing it in such a helpful spirit.
• Failed to locate a dead animal that reeked of something worse than death. 

The second time we went up, I'd load up the truck with our newly felled tree material (thousands of pounds of it, that poor purple truck) and drive it down over the bank to dump it. Stacey and the kids would run down around the bank to meet me where we were dumping it. They'd then race to empty the bed of the truck as fast as they could so that they could get to the good stuff... riding in bed back up to do it all over again.

About 15 kids piled in each time, and as soon as we took off, they screamed deliriously like they were just given ice cream on Santa's lap at Disney World on the last day of school. I'd gun it all the way up to 10 m.p.h. until they almost passed out from the excitement. Then, the 5 year-old kids would toss the 2 year-old kids like footballs to other small children waiting on the ground. We're in for some "interesting" days in Las Lomitas. Construction starts on Monday.