If a tree falls on your house and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Flowers from my daughter's garden

There was a little bit of excitement going on in the neighborhood yesterday. Well it wasn't exactly excitement it was more like something interesting. But not all that interesting, it was just kind of different. Yeah that's it, something different was happening in the neighborhood yesterday.

The neighbor across the street had this ginormous dead tree in their backyard and since it was a hazard to several houses in a windstorm we always wondered how they were going to get rid of that tree.

Their backyard is surrounded by a wooden fence, the tree was pretty close to their house, and there were power lines not that far away from the tree. So it looked like no matter how you cut it, or removed the huge branches from it, they were going to fall on something and break it.

Yesterday morning a pickup truck arrived and three guys started unloading climbing equipment chainsaws, and ropes,  as soon as I saw that I knew it was going to be fun to watch.

It took them about eight hours but they took that tree down piece at a time and without damaging anything. They used a very simple method, since any limb they cut off would fall on something and damage it, they threw a rope over a higher limb, attached that rope to the middle of the lower limb, and tied another rope to the bottom of the lower limb. The guy in the tree then sawed off the lower limb and the guys on the ground holding the ropes guided the limb to where they wanted it to fall. It was kind of time-consuming but it worked amazingly well.

I took a few pictures of the whole operation and I hope these pictures will show how the experts handled a difficult tree removal job.

                               theboondork

This gives you an idea of what a small space the tree had to be removed from. No matter what direction it went it was going to hit something.

This young man, who looked college-age to me, spent the whole day in that tree, other than a brief lunch break, and appeared to me to have a very dangerous job.

I never imagined anyone would climb that high in a dead tree.

I didn't meet this young man but I have a feeling you won't find him out in the street breaking windows and burning police cars like the college kids his age. Maybe a lot of those college kids should be expelled and forced to get a job like this to see what the real world is like.

I'm no tree cutting expert but I do recognize a job that should require a helmet.

I don't know what they pay this young man, but it ain't enough.

The final cut. And now he decides to wear a helmet, as if that would help if that thing fell on him. And no it didn't fall on the lady in the blue shirt with the camera