GETTING OUR BIG OAK TREE TRIMMED

On Sunday afternoon, right when the picnic was over and everybody had gone home, the phone rang, and guess who it was!  It was Uncle Chuck, the man who trims our trees for us!  And he was calling to say that he could come on Monday and cut the dead limbs off the big, huge tall oak tree in the back yard.  So Mom said that would be fine.  She had to cancel her plans to go to the shelter and play with the poor, homeless doggies, but it was more important to have Uncle Chuck come over because Uncle Chuck is a very busy man, and you just have to let him trim your trees whenever he says he can do it.

So Monday morning, Uncle Chuck and his helper, Uncle Aaron, got here about 9 a.m., and all of us dogs had to stay in the house so that no one would bite anybody.  But Mom didn't have to stay in the house, so she went outside and watched the tree being trimmed, and she took some photos so that I could use them in my blog, which is what I'm going to do today.  And now I will tell you how Uncle Chuck trimmed our tree.

First of all, he put a really, really tall ladder up beside the tree.

And after that, he threw a little thing that was sort of like a bean bag up in the tree until he got it over a big branch way up there.  Except that he couldn't get it up there by throwing it, so he finally had to use a giant slingshot to do it.  Then when the beanbag thing fell back down, it pulled a little rope over the branch, and a big rope got tied on the little rope, and then it got pulled over the branch.  This rope was what Uncle Chuck used to tie himself to the tree so that if he slipped, he wouldn't fall all the way to the ground and get hurt.

Uncle Chuck wears a funny yellow hat, and he has to take a lot of equipment up in the tree to do his work with.  Most of the equipment gets tied to his belt.  The chainsaw weighs 20 pounds, and some of the other stuff is pretty heavy, too.

When he gets all loaded up and tied in to the rope, he starts climbing.  And when he gets to the branch he wants to cut off, he ties another rope to the branch.  That way, when he cuts the branch off, it can be lowered down slowly by Uncle Aaron, which will keep it from smashing into stuff on the way down.

Here's a picture Mom took through the bathroom window.  The reason it looks like there is a fog is because the window is dirty.  But don't tell Mom I told you that!

After all the dead branches got cut down, Uncle Aaron and Uncle Chuck cut them into firewood for us to use next winter.  Mom won't have to buy as much wood in the fall because now we have some off of our very own tree.  And since it is oak, it will burn really well.

Uncle Aaron stacked the firewood in the back of the yard.  Some of the branches turned out to be hollow, so who knows what might have been living inside them!

Anyway, after Uncle Chuck trimmed our tree, he also cut some branches off the neighbor's oak tree because those branches were hanging over the wires that bring electricity into our house.  Mom is afraid that if there is a big storm sometime, like especially an ice storm, these limbs might fall on our wires and break them.

After that, Mom asked Uncle Chuck to trim one dead limb off the locust tree in our front yard, which he did.  So now Mom doesn't have to look at that dead limb anymore, which she has been doing for the last three years.

Well, I'm sorry to say that because it took such a long time for all the tree trimming to happen, a couple of dogs peed in the house.  I'm not saying who did this, but Mom thinks it might have been Nicky and I.  Anyway, when the tree trimming was mostly over, Mom took me out in the front yard to meet Uncle Chuck, and he said I was very cute.  We went down by Uncle Chuck's truck, which was parked on the street, and I peed in the yard, like a good girl.

Then I realized that there was a dog in the truck, and this dog looked kind of scary, so I headed back to the house.  Mom said she had already met the dog, and his name was Whisper.  He was Uncle Chuck's dog, and he was a Staffordshire terrier from South Africa.  He was mostly brindle, with some white markings.  Mom thought Whisper was very handsome and friendly, and she liked him.  But later on, when Uncle Aaron got Whisper out of the truck and took him for a walk, Mom noticed that Whisper still had all his boy parts, which she was not too happy to see.

But anyway, getting back to the tree trimming story, the last thing that happened was that all the stuff that got cut off the trees was fed into a big, noisy machine that chewed it up and spat it into the back of the truck.  Then after that was all done, Mom paid the bill, which was $350.  This was less than a lot of vet bills that Mom has paid lately, so she didn't mind paying it.  And now we hope we won't have to have any more tree trimming done for quite a while.