Maybe now we can cook out without worrying about our burgers getting pooped on.

When I pulled into the driveway after work the other night, I got that weird feeling that something was out of the ordinary. It took me a minute to realize that I was seeing the back of our neighbor’s house for the first time ever. You see, up until this week, our backyard has looked like this:

That massive heap of vegetation you see is an overgrown mess of a bamboo birdie housing project. For the past two years we have battled with this nasty, invasive, ill-advisedly transplanted pest of a plant.

Sure, a single stem or two of bamboo may look cute in a decorated pot in your office next to your miniature zen garden, but get it together with a couple hundred of his friends, and before you know it, your backyard smells like sweaty feet, sounds like a rainforest, and all of your lawn furniture is covered in bird poop.

As someone who really doesn’t care for birds, having hundreds of them nesting mere feet away from my house has always been a little unsettling, so I was thrilled when I came home to find out that it had all been chopped down.

The former tenants, however, were PISSED. As Holly and I tried to play a game of fetch, these angry, homeless birds kept dive-bombing my poor dog. I guess they figured she was the mastermind behind the great Bird Eviction of ‘08.

Just to give you an idea of exactly how much bamboo they chopped down, I drove by the front of the house this morning, and every square inch of their front yard was stacked waist-high with bamboo.

I tried to take some “after” photos, but I am lazy and forgot to do it until it was almost dark, so these are kind of crappy. I kind of like the underexposed black and white one, though–it makes our backyard look very spooky.