Didn't see that coming

I've been nagging Jeremy about taking down a few trees in the yard for quite some time now. (Note to self: be careful what you nag for!)

There are way too many trees on our tiny 1/8 acre. Some of them are mere inches apart. Three in particular are Siberian Elms - junk trees basically. They spend all year dropping branches and twigs all over the place; spreading their evil weed tree seeds all over the whole yard; and blocking out all the sun to our garden. And to top it off, these trees are known for not having good joints. That is, where branches fork off, the tree is weak and prone to rot, so those big old branches are liable to just fall off out of the blue. (Or in a storm, which happened in 2011.) Unfortunately these trees have gotten very big and are leaning precariously over our house and our neighbors. They have to go! We got an estimate on tree removal last fall. While it's not too expensive, we still can't really afford it.  Besides, Jeremy has a chainsaw and we have access to ladders. Surely we can do it ourselves!  Er, that is, surely if I nag Jeremy long enough he'll eventually do it! =)

We had some spare time this afternoon and Jeremy whipped out the chainsaw.  The plan was to take down one of the big branches.  Very big branches. If it fell too far to one side it would take out our neighbor's electrical; too far to the other side it would take out ours.  So the plan was to cut it so it would fall into the Kitalpa tree a couple feet over.

Which it very nicely did for us. Jeremy cut several feet off the bottom of it hanging out of the tree, and then we discovered it was STUCK in the Kitalpa!



 Jeremy actually swung from the thing a few times and it was not going anywhere. Hmm. Didn't see that coming!





So now we had a huge branch stuck and swaying ever so slightly in the top of this other tree. I won't go into all the details since our mothers read this and I don't want them to know - it was kind of scary.  But I suspect it was like when you see someone tipping back in their chair and you're just sure they're going to fall at any minute, it looks so unsafe! (Or maybe that's just me?) But when you tip back in your chair it feels totally safe. So I'm sure Jeremy felt totally safe, but I was pretty sure he was going to fall off that ladder, chainsaw in hand, at any moment and die a horrible death.  Geez, I guess I asked for it when I nagged him for years to cut these darn trees down!





Skip to the end: Jeremy got the huge branch out of the Kitalpa with no injuries to either of us and he cut a second branch off the junk trees for good measure.



Now there is a huge pile of brush to be dealt with - which the neighborhood birds are going to go bonkers over. I don't know why, but they love hanging out in brush piles, dozens and dozens of them.  I'll see if I can catch them in the act this weekend.



(In other news, I am very annoyed with Blogger/Picasa/etc for constantly having to update and change things that worked perfectly well before!  They have made it very difficult for me to put pictures and text where I want it! Grr!)