I Hereby Resolve!

Happy New Year to all my loyal readers.  Have you all made your resolutions for 2015?  Resolutions are kind of a big deal - they set the tone for the future, they help you define your priorities, they even help reveal your personality.  I only made one resolution this year.  It wasn't about weight loss, or exercising more, or changing the way I eat, or even about de-cluttering my life.  Those are all worthy resolutions, but this year my single resolution was a decision to remove something - and to do WHATEVER it takes to make the removal complete.  No, it's not an addiction.  Or plastic surgery.  Actually, the item to be removed is in this picture:

 Do you see it?  The little white birdhouse just above the swing in the center of the photo?  It's gotta go.  It is driving me crazy (has been for 7 years now - answers a lot of questions, doesn't it?) and I am bound and determined that 2015 will not pass until that thing is gone.  

Let me give you some background.  We bought our house in the summer of 2006 when I was pregnant with our oldest son.  The house had previously belonged to an elderly couple and that couple loved junk and hated to clean.  I lost track of how many loads of trash we hauled out of basements and garages and how many trips I took to the dump with yard waste that I cleaned out of the flowerbeds and yard.  They also  loved birdhouses, because every tree in the yard (and several fake "post trees" that they added) held at least one birdhouse.  The problem with the birdhouses was that the birds had given up on them several decades before, and left them to be infested with earwigs.  It was quite disgusting, as the least jiggle of a birdhouse brought down a hail of earwigs, both dead and alive.  Throughout the summer I slowly removed all of the birdhouses, except the one pictured above.  It was VERY securely attached and in a place rather awkward for a pregnant woman to reach, so I decided to leave it for the future.  Like I said, that was back in 2006.  Each summer I would forget about the birdhouse, because the leaves would disguise it from my view, but then winter would arrive, and the birdhouse would reappear - taunting me with my forgetfulness.

But no more.  My resolution this year is to remove that birdhouse.

 So today, I got bundled up against the chill, collected my son's baseball bat, and headed outside into the snow.

Five minutes later, the birdhouse was tossed onto the "burn next spring pile" and I was back inside, resolution completed.

 Check out that birdhouse-free view.  A weight has been lifted from my shoulders!

Happy resolution keeping, everyone!