Just left my chair by the side window and went to piss and looked out the bathroom window at the backyard and holy shit, this place is really coming together! Real payoff for not making compromises all those years — or rather, the compromise was putting up with the previous squalor until I had all my ducks lined up to take the next step towards final state.

Realizing from growth rates that the two trees out there in the upper backyard were younger than I’d thought when I moved in, and combining with what I know of the previous residents’ plot arc, “tended by a methhead until he left his methhead girl and kid and she ignored it for a decade” actually explained the shape they were in pretty well.