Life in the Bristolwood

Unrelated to this entry, but awfully cute is this photo I found on the Nikon. I took it yesterday morning, through my less than clean (ahem) bedroom window. Thus, the blur. I was going to discard it, but when I saw those eyes……

Mark has been wanting me to cut down seven maple trees in front of the house.  A couple of them have been  attacked by some type of bug that has caused them to deform in their trunks.  One of them was far too close to the porch.  Another has bark literally falling off it.

Since the little camper is still at the RV repair shop, and we are expecting a call any time now to say it is fixed, we wanted to get those trees cut up and removed.  When I got out of bed today, the winds were gusting and I didn’t think it was good to cut.

Mark noticed that at about 9:30,  the winds had subsided. Thus, he said we should take those buggers down! None of them was big…but they were tall!

One down….six to go.

What a mess! I never cut live trees.  This was a new and miserable experience! I had to limb these trees and that was a messy and tiresome job.

You can see that this stand of six trees growing in a cluster just isn’t going to work. Trees need room to grow and spread.

There is the long and short of it.  Seven trees all down on the ground waiting to be limbed and cut into firewood. (not for this year, but next)

Aha! There is one key element I failed to mention in this caper!  You will know if you read here that I am nearly intolerant of heat.  Well, today the heat was on! The temperature as I was cutting soared up into the 80′s.

We dropped two of the trees onto the driveway, so I limbed those two and got wood off the driveway, but everything else remains. What a mess! However, tomorrow’s temperature is supposed to be much cooler as a cold front passes through.  I certainly hope so! By the time I came in this afternoon, my face was blood red.  It took quite some time to cool off. 

All in all, I am relieved that every tree came down gracefully….no near disasters! I will try to get a photo of the house from the driveway after I clean up tomorrow. It looks so different as the house is quite visible from the road now.