Mesmerizing

Our neighbor cut the tops off some of his elm trees. They look really ugly now, but it's necessary with elms to do this, I understand. And honestly, if those branches got too big and broke, they would fall right on our roof. So I'm good with it. Except for this - when the dude would cut huge chunks off the tree, they would drop onto our property, creating these huge divots. The chunks were so big that I could hear them pounding onto our grass - thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Oh well. Our ground underneath the grass isn't that smooth anyways.

Dylan watched these guys trim the trees forever. And all the neighbors would stop what they were doing and just watch. It really is quite mesmerizing:

It reminds me of when I was teaching school. They replaced one of my accordion walls with an actual wall. (Though they didn't wall it clear up to the ceiling. For some unknown reason, they still left a big open gap at the top of the new wall between my classroom and the classroom next door, so if Paul's classroom got rowdy, we heard it, and if my classroom got rowdy, Paul's class heard it.) Anyways, they had to paint the wall, and they decided to do it during the school day, again, for some unknown reason. So I was trying to teach, and all my kids were staring with their mouths hanging open at these guys painting, up and down, up and down. Finally, I said, "Okay, guys. Look. The painters go up, and they go down. Pretty fascinating. Now can we get back to work??"