Yikes!

Yesterday it was really really really really really windy. So windy that what I thought were brown clouds in the sky were in reality dust clouds (think of those pictures of Oklahoma farms during the Dust Bowl days in the depression). It was so windy that I had to shut all the windows because I could taste the dirt that was blowing in. It was so windy that I heard a big C-R-A-C-K and looked out of the window just in time to see our tree falling down. Well, not quite all of the tree, but half of it!

This is our lovely tree BEFORE:

And this is AFTER:


And this is what our house looked like from the street:


Yes, there is a house behind all that tree.

I called Keith at work to give him the heads up so that he wouldn't have a heart attack when he came home and saw our yard full of tree, and he says he'll have to go buy a chain saw to chop it all up, and he needed a chain saw anyway because, well, doesn't every household need a chain saw?

While waiting for him to get home I had a brilliant idea. Why not call some tree guys to come and clean it all up for us? So, when he got home I started calling around and within about half an hour we had the foreman in our yard quoting us $400.00 to have his crew chop it all up, cut down the tree, remove the stump, and haul it all away. The tree was a goner, too dangerous to leave up. Well, $400.00 seemed like a reasonable price considering that it would have taken Keith the entire weekend to chop up all the tree branches, chop down the rest of the tree, and then figure out how to haul it all away, not to mention the dump fees and the gas to make dozens of trips to the dump.

So, about 15 minutes later, here comes a small truck with two guys who start chainsawing up the branches and piling them up.


And then along comes a HUGE truck.


That has a huge scooper thing in the middle of it.


That scoops everything up and dumps it in the truck. Cool! The little boy next door thought it was pretty cool, too.


And, then it was time to chop down the rest of the tree.

There it goes.


The tree is down. That's Keith supervising there.


More scooping.


And no more tree. Just a few stray leaves to remind us of what was.

The whole process took less than an hour.

So, goodbye tree, goodbye shade, and goodbye raking the leaves (not that I did that anyway, either Keith would rake them up or we'd just let the wind blow them down the street), and hello weird looking yard with a big empty spot.