This weekend was pretty nice. As I mentioned previously, I got to spend some one-on-one time with a reali live MacBook. I was a little worried about the screen glare and keyboard on the new Mac, because reports on both have been split. I was really happy with both. Though there was some screen glare, it wasn't any worse than the monitor I'm using right now. Sure you can see some reflection, but you block it out mentally pretty quickly. The keyboard was a non-issue. It was extremely comfortable to type on, and the typos I did make were typos I'd make on any other keyboard. Having the keys a little less scalloped (they're not *completely* flat) than yon standard desktop keyboard is probably a little more comfortable to type on. It's also just about the perfect size for lugging around; even K had to admit it looked pretty nice.

After I finished drooling over the laptop we stopped by Lee Valley Tools to pick up a Japanese pruning saw. They had one for $20, which was coincidentally how much we wanted to spend. We looked around a little more and basically decided that it was a homeowners nirvana. There are some really interesting things there, including this Engineering compass I fell in love with (you can't even get a plastic compass from MEC for under $10!). Unfortunately, we only left with the saw.

On Sunday we used that saw to do a little yard work.

OK, to say "a little" is actually somewhat misleading. On Sunday we "harsh" pruned our honeysuckle tree. The tree has been in the yard since the house was built (1948), and had grown to 12' tall and 10' wide. Unfortunately, it had grown quite leggy and was full of dead wood. We started out by trying to get the dead wood out, as well as branches that were primarily comrpised of dead wood. However, it turned out that by the time we'd taken a couple of the bad branches out that we were really better off just hacking it to about 4' off the ground. The tree is much less significant than it was previously; however it will grow back aggressively over the next couple of years. We weren't the first to do a hard prune on the tree either; someone had done it 20 years previous from the looks of things.

It was a bit shocking at first, especially with the amount of sky we can now see from our patio. However, it was a gardening task that really needed to be done, and the tree will become healthier and grow more vigourously as a result. It was mainly just a shock for us to have such an empty hole in our back yard's landscape, especially since we previously took down our dead birches.