The Fire/Wind Storm

I'm very behind on blogging so I'm going to try to catch up.  Friday, November 18th, 2011 Noah and I were woken up with text message from a friend about 6 am wanting to know if we were okay since there was a fire on the south side of town.  We had no idea what they were talking about so we looked outside and everything seemed normal.  We came to find out that it was one of the biggest fires in the town's history.  Luckily, it was miles from our house.  As the day went on, I got more and more nervous about it nearing our house but it stayed miles away.  

The wind was the other thing making this day interesting.  The reason the fire started and got so big out and out of control was the 60 mph wind gusts that did not let up.  It was pretty intense.  Once they got the fire under control later that day, Noah and I came home to an interesting sight in the neighborhood.  Over half of the fences were blown down.  Luckily, we only lost a few boards out of ours but our neighbors was completely down. 

We were really fortunate that our fence held up.  We were not so fortunate that the big tree in our front yard took quite a beating.  It was already leaning over and didn't have the best root system.  When I walked over to check it out after work, I could bounce on the roots about 2 ft up and down.  The tree had not uprooted but it had definitely started to uproot.  Since the tree was leaning toward the kitchen already (and even though I do want to remodel our kitchen, I didn't think the tree falling in to it was the best way), we decided we needed to cut it down as soon as possible.  This led to our fun, tree cutting Saturday.  

Noah went to Home Depot and bought us another saw.  He and I started chopping down the tree piece by piece.  By the time it was all done, I think it took us about four hours to get it all cleaned up.  It was sad to lose such a great tree, but we gained a mountain view.

 After I chopped down all the branches I could reach while Noah was buying another saw, he started working on the branches out of reach.

 Because the tree was leaning toward the house, we had to wrap a rope around the top.  I pulled on the rope while Noah cut the top of the tree off.

 Success! It fell right where we needed it to, not on the roof and not on the garage.  Our neighbors were very worried that it was going to fall on their house.  We were very worried it was going to fall on ours. 

 All the branches chopped off and the top of the tree is down.

 Now to cut all the branches down in to smaller sizes so that they will easily fit in the back of a pickup truck.

All done!  All the branches are cut in to small pieces and the people coming to take it away were on their way to our house.  Soon we would have our front yard branch free.

All in all, we were very fortunate that the wind did not completely uproot the tree.  Had that happened, I'm sure that I would have a new kitchen by now but I would have been very sad that I would have had to get a new roof too.  

It will be an interesting summer as that tree was our sun guard and it helped keep the house much cooler than I expect it will be without it.  I'm also at a loss as to what plants to plant under the kitchen window now since I had planned on planting partial sun plants there.  Now I have to find plants that LOVE the sun as in the summer, the sun beats down on that side of the house.  I accept the challenge :D