The Giving Tree

It's a sad day here at my house today. We are saying goodbye to a dear old friend. This friend is a tree. We called it The Giving Tree. This tree is why we bought this house. When I first looked at this house, I was not so crazy about it. The owner of this house was a lady in her 80's. She kept up with the inside of the house, but the outside of the house was lacking. So needless to say we have done alot to it so far. So, back to the tree. When our realtor showed us he house we walked the .75 acre and both Mark and I were in LOVE with this tree. It is a Brazilian Pepper Tree. I could just picture my boys climbing that tree, swinging in a tree swing and father and sons building a tree fort. Yessssss! So we buy the house and the first thing my son does is climb the tree and quickly fall out of it on his head. Okay, shit happens. My niece is over playing with her cousins in the tree and guess what? SHE falls out of the tree on her head. A new rule goes into effect: If you want to climb the tree you have to wear a bike helmet. Springtime comes shortly after we move in and I hear this loud electrifying buzzing sound. What the.........? I look outside my kitchen window and this gigantic tree is ALIVE with bees. Like 5 million bees. From about Feb to May you have to duck and cover while in the backyard to get from point A to point B and hope you don't get stung. All that aside we still keep the tree because we love this tree. I think it is at least 50 years old. However, we have plumbing problems, and the problems are being caused by the ginormous roots that are strangling our pipes and causing them to collapse. So down it comes today. All four of us in this family are tree hugging saps, so this is just breaking our hearts. On a good note we are recycling the wood and our good artist friend up in SLO Town is going to make a few cool pieces of furniture and a tiki out of The Giving Tree.

And the Tree was happy.

On a different note, I'm posting a picture of the the tree being cut (sorry for the poor quality, it is taken with my camera phone because I am having isses with the CF card for my regular camera). The guy is really nice and gave me all sorts of facts about turkeys (We have a pet turkey named Arnold). BUT he has this helper guy who stands around barely working, wearing a wife beater tank top. This guy keeps pulling up his shirt to expose his beer gut and then plays with his belly button. Everytime I look out there he is doing it. I am seriously going to hork.