As those of you who drive by our house may have noticed, we had the huge live oak tree in our front yard removed today. When we orig­i­nally moved into the house, a big shady tree was one of our favorite things about the place. That all changed last year when, dur­ing a thun­der storm, we watched a huge branch break off and crash into the yard. It shook the house, barely miss­ing the power-lines and our roof. Needless to say, the more we looked into keep­ing our tree, the worse it looked. Live oak trees drop­ping their limbs is a reg­u­lar occur­rence in their long lives but not some­thing we could really live with since it had got­ten so big and close to the house. Live oak trees also grow some seri­ous root sys­tems so even if it were to fall away from the house, it would have taken a good part of our liv­ing room with it. Finally, if live oaks have been split at some point in the past, which ours had, one side usu­ally keeps grow­ing the new branches while the other side kind of atro­phies. This explained why our tree liked to point all of it’s huge mass of limbs towards Kelly’s new car.

Yeah, that tree had to go. Unlike our neigh­bors, who hired Billy-Bob and his crack crew of “who ever’s will­ing to ride in my truck bed”, Kelly and I found a licensed and insured tree ser­vice. This means that, instead of a Ford pickup and some chaw, we had a bucket truck, claw truck, and a stump grinder show up on our tiny lawn. These guys were quick and pro­fes­sional. The best part was that Sophie slept through most of the noise.

Speaking of Sophie…
Since the last video was so well received, I’m going to try and get some more onto YouTube. Please be patient though as it takes time to make videos that will fit. I’m also going to shoot more pho­tos for our Flickr gallery. Lately, I’ve been tak­ing a break from being Sophie’s PR Rep as the time it takes to cre­ate, man­age, and upload her stuff has been taken over with actu­ally spend­ing time tak­ing care of her. She is play­ing, gurggling, and grow­ing at an incred­i­ble rate.