Trees... Part I

I'm so behind in blogging that I don't even feel like getting caught up. And I wanted to do a trees post to update you all on the exciting world of trees in my life (how could we ever forget poor little charlie, who is fairing quite well these days). But tonight, as I preloaded my photos, I realized there were far too many pictures to lump all of my tree stories into one post. So tonight, you get "Trees... Part I". (Part II is soon to follow... I hope!)

So it all started with these boys.

These guys are my free yard slaves
(we trade math tutoring on campus...they take care of my back yard)

And two stubborn pine tree stumps.

The boys talked me into letting them try their hands at removing the stumps. After they fully explained "their process" (which included chain saws... and that's why they had to fully explain "their process" to me) I let them have a try.

Well, their chain saw was a dinky electric one (you'll see it below) and it gave out quicker than expected. I called my friend Ryan (the tiling guy) to borrow his chain saw and well, here's where that went:

"Move over boys. Let me show you how a real man does it."

Ryan put those boys in their spot... but I think they got over it because he brought over so many cool man toys for them to drool over. And I decided to take advantage of Ryan's man tools and unconditional kindness and had him trim up some low hanging branches on my remaining two pine trees.

You would think after that fiasco, I would stop listening to my yard boys and their brilliant ideas... But they are pretty cheap labor and I did have some other yard ugliness that I wanted to take care of. So, the following Tuesday, which happened to be Veteran's Day and a day off work & school, the boys and some other friends went to work to take out these ugly beasts:

We tamed the beasts by cutting the tree back to the stump using the same bitty chainsaw from the pine tree stumps... You would think we would have learned our lesson, right?

The chainsaw broke on us again, so while the boys sat there trying to "fix" it,

Becca took a hand saw and cut one whole tree down all by her lonesome.
She was quite proud of herself! What a woman!

Now, getting the stump itself out was pretty tricky... we only had one truck and it was too light for stump yanking, really. Which is why we had to do this:

But putting more weight in the back didn't really help the cause. We only got one stump out on our own before having to call in the big boys... But these guys were pretty proud of their one stump!

So, then the big boys came (aka Ryan, his man tools, his man truck and his man friend... wait, that doesn't sound quite right. Ryan isn't gay... um, manLY friend... anyway) and they finished the job.

Two truck and one trailer load to the dump later, and the side of my yard looks like this:

And now I know my neighbors on that side.