Timber!!

This is what we worked on yesterday afternoon. It was now or never since football has started. If you will remember, we had done some work on it earlier in the summer, with Brandon crawling up as far as he could to tie off a rope. Yesterday Greg took as many small limbs off as he could before we got to the scary part of dropping the remaining tree/limb that was the full height of the tree.

He studied on what was the best way to handle the tree. When he commented "yeah, we can do this", I went in and got the camera. Insurance purposes, ya know? I told him it reminded me of the redneck videos where the guy says, "yeah, this will work, watch this", and the tree falls on the truck and crushes it.
The tree is larger than it looks just glancing at it from the street. Look how small Greg appears. We were dealing with trying to keep it away from the house, away from the electrical lines, and away from the existing smaller trees in its way.

Here I am ready to jump in the truck and start pulling.
Whew!! The tree is down and no one was hurt. The only damage was to the little red oak that we had just done some trimming on. The big tree caught it in the middle and broke a limb out. Hopefully it will recover and we can begin to reshape it next year.
We made lots of trips to the back to haul limbs. There is still a lot of remaining clean up to do but at least the tree is down. Will try to borrow another chain saw so that it will go quicker.
Greg and I were pretty tuckered out. No one had to rock us to sleep last night. I told him not to leave the house this morning until he made sure I could get out of the bed!!!