Dead Trees & Baseball Games

Go Astros!

Yesterday was a sad day at our house, more specifically in our back yard. The giant elm tree that formerly resided there has now left the building. All that remains of the once mighty 80 foot tall tree is an inglorious stump. Stump is such an ugly word - don't you think - but a stump is all we have to remember our friend, who has now gone to the big mulch factory in the sky. For those of you who hadn't heard the news, our elm tree never came back from its winter vacation. When the leaves fell off last October we had no way of knowing that they wouldn't be coming back.

Yesterday morning at around 9:00 the crew from the Lanza Tree Service showed up. After a brief introduction to the tree they got right to work taking it down. I must admit to just a little trepidation at the thought of turning over the safety of not just my house but also our next door neighbor's house to four young guys who spoke about ten words of English between them. It was a little reassuring that an English-speaking Mr. Lanza himself showed up to kick things off, but he was gone by the time the real chain-sawing excitement got underway. As a gesture of my complete confidence in them, I placed a lawn chair in the center of the back yard and sat in it all day - the perfect spot from which to watch their every move. My positioning didn't seem to bother them much. I, on the other hand, did have a few moments of mild panic during the morning and afternoon. There's just something slightly discomforting about a guy with a chain saw at the top of a huge tree that sits seven feet from your back porch yelling down to his associates in a language you don't understand just before he starts sawing and having the entire group break into laughter. However, in spite of their laughter, the boys from Lanza did a great job, and their efforts kept me interested and entertaining for most of the nine hours I spent watching them.

For the naturalists among you, the highlight of the day came when a large raccoon decided to make a break for it as the chain saw approached his lair. As you will divine from one of the pictures below, a good portion of the tree was actually hollow, providing a nice residence for Mr. Raccoon. He scurried from the hollow in the tree, raced to the ground, and then sprinted along the fence line, circumventing the entire back yard before climbing up the fence and leaping into the neighborhood beyond. I have thought since what it would have been like had someone been walking down the the sidewalk at the precise instant the large raccoon vaulted over the fence into his unsuspecting path. A 9-1-1 call would probably have been in order.

Below I have included some pictures of the tree dismantling, starting from its full altitude at the beginning and ending with its attainment of stump status. Even the stump will disappear when the crew comes back on Tuesday with the stump grinder. Good-bye Mr. Elm. We'll miss the relief your shade provided to our summer electric bills.

Here's what the tree looked like before the cutting started.

A friend to raccoons, squirrels, ducks and all shade-loving people.

Here's what it looked like just before the raccoon decided to evacuate.

This is considered a condominium for a raccoon.

Attainment of "Stump Status"

After surviving the drama of Mr. Elm's demise, we decided that an outing to watch the Astros would put us all in a better frame of mind. "All" in this case included not just Vicki and I, but also Kayla, who was in town for a job interview. From the sound of things the interview went well, but I'll let her talk about the details, which I anticipate will show up in her blog at some point in the not too distant future. Going to the game made me feel that the world had again assumed its correct positioning in the universe, because I had gotten the tickets free from a vendor at work. As I'm fairly certain most of you will recall from one of my blogs last summer, after a streak of almost 30 years, we actually bought tickets to a game while I was unemployed. It was painful, and I vowed never to do it again. Anyway, the Astros beat the Pirates 4-3 in a game that lasted only two hours and four minutes. There were fireworks after the game, and a good time was had by all. The only downside to the evening was that we didn't get one of the commemorative Astros 45-year fleece blankets that were given away to the first 10,000 fans. We'll get there earlier for the 50-year blankets.