I'd been toying with the idea of replacing the mostly dead pine tree in the back yard with a grapefruit tree, but had not yet worked up the motivation to make a special trip to a nursery just to find one. But then, there we were at Costco yesterday afternoon, on a trip spurred mostly by my desire to pick up a box of the cutest handmade cards ever, and we were greeted with a huge selection of brand new citrus trees, and right there in the front were ruby red grapefruit trees. So what could I do but pick one up and put it in our cart and bring it home with us?

We did go out on this afternoon, after the choral fest that was the Palm Sunday service, and ponder how best to remove the aforementioned mostly dead pine. But that's when we discovered that mostly dead pine trees are quite painfully prickly, and that even one year is long enough for a tree to set down enough roots that you can't exactly just rip it out of the ground with your bare hands, and we also couldn't seem to locate the shovel, even though we know we have one, so the cute little grapefruit tree is currently still sitting in its pot right beside the back porch. I'm not too worried about it right now, mainly because we keep getting rainstorms, so it's getting plenty of water, and even a little sun when the storms break and psych us into thinking spring might actually be right around the corner, before promptly dumping several inches more water on us one more time. But I know we cannot leave it there indefinitely, and one of these days we are going to have to go out there and remove that stupid mostly dead tree, prickly bits or not, because the whole point of getting the grapefruit tree was to plant it so that some day, years from now, I will have grapefruits of my very own, and leaving it in its pot is sort of going to defeat that whole purpose.