Good news!

I have recovered from my earlier "mistakes" with Picasa, and I have only 56 images left to resize and rename.

The captions are all written.

Soon, a thread here will have many posts added to it.

Now it is soon.

and soon it is now.

If it be Yuge, why not start a new thread?

Happy today?

In addition to being adequately medicated, I am still happy I didn't die, again. Different house, different tree. This one is a good sized Buckeye, just coming in to flower now. But the branch that had to be removed was killed by that fucking english ivy. It has been looming over Twil's truly lovely Japanese Maple, just leafing out now, and also above the clear corrugated plastic roof of the deck cover. The branch you see is thoroughly dead, years dead now. And it is as big around as my leg near the trunk.

I took advantage of a break in the rain last week to get up there and bring it down. This time, there was room for my big ladder, but, friends, I am not happy on a ladder, or the roof. Nope, nope nope nopenothankyou. I'll try to keep these in a logical sequence, what I see I didn't include in my photojournalist/lumberjack adventure was a wider shot of the roof that precluded me from positioning the ladder closer to the ends of the branches to be removed. Wasn't possible.

So. Here in the first picture you can see the old dead branch overlaps the maple quite a lot. You can also see lots of the dead skeleton of the fucking english ivy running up the trunk. That got removed too, though it was merely ugly, and not a hazard to breaking shit or hurting people.
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The second shot is a bit more of a closeup, as close as I could get with my limited zoom while standing on the ground. You can see the dead stuff easily now. This large branch is where I leaned and lashed the ladder before I started cutting.
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Picture three shows a stump of a small branch to the left of the ladder that I removed to clear my way toward the tips of the branch. There was a minimal up and down the ladder, I hate going up that ladder. My boots are big, and on the step where the locking hooks for the extension rest on some rung, I can *barely* get both boots on the rung. It's just... I don't like it. So I minimized the number of trips, and that's why you don't see the strap tying the top of the ladder to the branch. This was before I traveled up there to strap in. Sorry.
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And here in the fourth picture you can see a lot more clear daylight where there used to be that big branch stretching to the sky. It fell into the maple. I worked it through the maple down to the ground.
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Here I have repositioned the ladder to give me access to a number of smaller deadwood that I cleared out. I still strapped in, but I only had to set the ladder one time. Not much of a before and after, the before pic is really in the previous post, and here you can see the after and where they landed.

I can still see some deadwood that *could* be removed, but nothing urgent. I'm done trimming this tree for now.

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Gravdigr Tree Guy: Alrighty then, sir, that'll be $450.

Gravdigr Tree Guy: Sir? Sir, are you ok? Let me help you back up. How many fingers do you see?

And that's hittin 'em with the bill, not a tree limb.

My Uncle was getting old so he paid a guy to do it. Then after tree guy left he put up a ladder to paint the cutoffs. Spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. :(

Shit.:(

Kitten has returned home after three days' shagging ....

Happy because my wife's company is being sold and her boss who founded the company and is retiring will make good on his promise to take care of the key employees who have stuck it out all these years and helped build the company up to what it is today. She will get a super good bonus in her next paycheck, she can finally cash in her 20,000+ shares of stock and also exercise her options on the other 100,000 shares she has.

This has always been something we hoped would happen but in knew the reality of it happening wasn't something you could take to the bank as they say, but now we can! This will be her 20th year working there and there have been plenty of down years where paychecks were reduced or even deferred until times got better. This makes up for all the worries and headaches, sweat and toil over the years!

The downside is that the IRS will get a big chunk but that's just the way it is. We'll do everything we can to lower the taxes but they are what they are.

Congratulations Chris, now she can stay home and keep an eye on you. ;)

Warm weather has finally arrived! I have the sore gardening muscles to prove it ...

Thanks Gravdigr for your post. I was thinking of you the whole time. I don't have $450 for this job, so I feel I got away with one. There's a big, old fucked up cherry tree in the front yard that's gonna get much the same treatment.

xoB, I am sorry and a little chilled to hear about your uncle. Fuck, he was on my mind too, despite not knowing his name.

On a lighter note WTG HOUSTONS!!!!!