Going in the other direction, I have seen it asserted that one's grandparents' siblings should be called your grand-aunt or grand-uncle, not great-aunt or great-uncle, but they do not seem to be getting much traction.

we are both third and fourth cousins.

Whoa. And no time travel?

You'd be amazed at what shenanigans people get up to without time travel.

At one point we had custody of a family bible (my father's mother's mother's family). They kept marrying cousins and names kept repeating - keeping Columbus separate from Columbus F. On my mother's side, one great-great- grandmother of mine married, he died and she married his brother. Supposedly had 20 (!) children, including several sets of twins. My mother remembered Milton and Wilton,, Cordelia and Ophelia (someone was reading Shakespeare that year) as well as several others.

I think my most interesting genealogical tidbit along those lines is my great grandfather whose mother, first wife, and second wife (my great grandmother) were all named Emma

Contact liaison for Matilda's Japanese abroad program and go over application requirements.

Brendon lived with a Japanese family on a rice farm when he was 9 in an exchange program when his dad was stationed there. He loved it. Also, best food ever. Fresh rice balls and noodles of yum.

This story is writing itself. What great character names!

Sounds like a delightful read to me.

Jesu, I've gone down five times to tell them to take less off the front tree.

Stressful.

They took a lot off the back trees, which is okay. But I don't want to lose the shade and cover of the canopy of our front yard tree.

Pruning is always stressful to watch, but the results will be thicker healthier trees. You may remember the Florida pruning which is horrifying before the regrowth.

JFC they didn't do what I wanted.

It's not a disaster but it's cut very high on the street side (higher than it needed to be) which diminishes the shade a lot. And they cut branches out of the canopy so there are more holes. Not a big deal but they were only supposed to cut deadwood.

And then because I went down there so many times they didn't cut it enough in front of the house, so it's still hanging down over the top of the garage.

I paid a shit ton of money for undesired results.

The tree will be fine and will probably benefit from the cut back but I'm disinclined to do this process again.

I'm thinking of the gardeners that went into Allyson's yard and did a hard cut back which was really upsetting to her.

I think their mindset is that people only do this every five or six years and they want their money's worth of chopping or something.

Ugh!! I am sorry, David. I'm confident you were clear on what you wanted.

Ugh!! I am sorry, David. I'm confident you were clear on what you wanted.

Language issues, but also their mindset. Everything's a chainsaw solution.

I just hate dealing with people that treat plants and trees as decoration instead of living things. A nuisance and liability to whack down.

I mean it's not a butcher job because I went down so many times but it's still not what I had discussed with the head of the company.

It'll fill back out in time, but I'm not going to do this again. When I first moved in I paid Emmett and Kalena to trim the bottom three or four feet of branches hanging down and that was a better solution.