Saturday, November 22, 2008

Damn That Felt Good

Sometimes you just gotta cut stuff down, especially if it's an ugly old 20-foot-tall scrub oak growing 12 inches from your house. Thirty years ago some kid planted an acorn there, and being the lazy homeowner that I am, it grew unfettered and wildly out of control.

So laying in bed awake at 2:00 AM stressing about the stock market, our remodel, garden pests, C++ memory leaks, and the dirty chain on my bike, now I also had visions of this stupid tree cracking our foundation and getting the house condemned. They say that stress is caused primarily by feeling a lack of control. I can't do anything about the stock market, but I do own a chainsaw. Few things provide such a visceral sense of raw power as a chainsaw cutting through fresh wood. One less thing to stress about now.

Next I'll clean my bike's chain.

5 comments:

Tom Anhalt said...

Tree Killer!

BTW, I've heard that some people use chain saw oil on their bike chains :-)

Kk said...

Hey! Chainsaw Therapy! Sounds like the next craze to me. Write a book and make a video. You could be like Tom Sawyer, only for cutting down unwanted brush instead of whitewashing fences.

Anonymous said...

Did you have a permit for that?

Anonymous said...

Grandma always could tell when her parents had been in a huge argument.....Great-Grandfather would be chopping wood.

Marco Fanelli said...

Ouch! This thing was a 20-foot tall weed, and a clear-and-present danger to our house (and the neighbor's house too). Not to mention it was horribly infested with some oak-leaf eating moth. I do wonder though, was I really supposed to get a permit? What defines when you need one? Where is the line drawn between, say, digging out a Day Lily plant and cutting down a tree? (Of course I'm not talking about city trees by the street, which a few scofflaws in my neighborhood did cut down!)