Mid-January, Rain - January 13, 2012 |
September 12, 2009 Cinching the Forked Tree, and Other Stuff I slept well and slept in. A far cry from the previous night. I knew I had to get to the bank sometime this morning to withdraw lots of cash that Dar had deposited on his end yesterday -- to pay for the stove, so I didn't linger too much over breakfast. I was able to get the money without difficulty. By then it was time to meet Rose and Marc at their house to help reload the pickup with lots of branches from the pine tree they took down last week. I don't know if I mentioned this, but it was a 74-foot tree that had to come down next to their barn, if the corn-delivery truck was expected to get to the silo this Fall to fill it. Marc did a slick job of downing the tree with the Dynahoe, and my heart was in my throat until it came down, in just the right place, at just the right moment. So they made three dump runs today to get rid of what was left of the branches. I helped load one of them, and raked the remainder into a pile and filled the tractor bucket with smaller stuff for their return. Then I headed to True Value to pick up the lawnmower gas cap I'd ordered, and whilst there picked up some grass shears and loppers of my own so I can stop borrowing H&M's. It's fine to borrow them but those are items we all need, and Rose was looking for the loppers today and couldn't find them, not knowing they were at my house. Marc of course was appalled that I paid actual money for NEW loppers, but told me about a garden-implement consignment shop in Manchester where I could go for the rest of my gardening needs. Cool. Now, as to the roof and the house painting... I went down to talk to Jody at the antique shop (the guy who sold me the fridge and the dishwasher), and before the words were out of my mouth he iterated that he and his friend Rick would LOVE to come and help when I organize the scraping/priming party. I'm trying to get the crew together for next weekend -- Dar is rounding up his fabulous immigrant laboring staff and their brothers and cousins, and Marc has a couple of sections of scaffolding and extra ladders, and Jody said he could loan scrapers and tarps and brushes, and he has an industrial paint sprayer for when we're ready to paint. What a sweetheart. Everybody in this town is so NICE. Jody is disabled; he had an accident some time back and his back is screwed up, he's had surgery on both hands and has bad arthritis so he can't grip much or lift much -- but he said he could come over for a couple of hours at least and help out. And he won't take any payment and neither will Rick. "Throw a couple of burgers on the grill and give Rick a beer at the end of the day and he'll be happy!" Good grief. I'll spend the rest of my days in this town doing good deeds for people, just to pass all the kindness forward. So if the weather holds we'll make headway on the painting issue, and the insurance companies will like that. Now, as to the roof; my chimney guy is coming out on Monday to give me an estimate on the roof on the ell. Meanwhile Jody's cousin's friend (or something like that) named Glenn is a roof guy, and if WE bring in the needed materials and the dumpster, he'll charge only for the work involved, and I might be able to save a lot of money that way. "He's a little rough cut," Jody says; "He has a scraggly, sorta 'Mountain Man' beard, and he talks a little rough, but his work is professional, he's a good person, and he doesn't even leave his cigarette butts around. He puts 'em in his pocket!" I'm gonna have Local Characters crawling all over my house. Marc was very much interested in my getting a quote from Glenn, too. Hey -- if I save a few hundred bucks, that's my back door and my Pex for the plumbing. ******** Then there were more errands, and I got home and had a snack and decided to run a load of laundry over to R&M's and check email and bring back their loppers. Once there, though, Rose asked if I was there to help cinch the HUGE ash tree in their back yard that is splitting down the middle. It forks near the bottom and the two sides are vastly tall, and each leans out from center with an unimaginable weight. There's a hole in the bottom where a woodchuck hides, and the crack now runs all the way up to the forked place. They were going to cable it next Spring but it suddenly seems to be parting visibly, and this tree would create a huge amount of damage on their property and their neighbors' if it were to come down. It's probably over 100 years old. So we went out and helped Marc get a cable around both sides above the first thick branches. We slid radiator hose onto the cables to pad them where they'd go around each half of the tree. He had to do most of the work, moving the big ladder from one half to the other to get cables in the right place. The cinching required incredible effort and we could tell he was pretty exhausted by the end, being a little less careful with the ladder and more impatient to finish. But it's done, the tree is saved, and we hope it's happy and feeling good. Then I got invited to stay for pork loin from the crockpot, and hey, that's as fitting an end to a Saturday as I can think of. The rest of ceiling-priming can wait until tomorrow. |
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