It was Man against the Tree and Man won.

That is, Ben won and he did it without tools, even gloves. Saturday, Ben & Tess & I went to watch Stanford lose (barely) to UCLA. After the game, we came back to my house. I made lemonade from the lemon tree in my yard. We ate oreos and drank lemonade and looked at the ugly fig tree. The previous weekend, I'd started hacking at the tree with my mini-Sawzall. Unfortunately, the blade was too small to effectively attack any of the larger limbs so I had to content myself with removing smaller branches.

Ben didn't let the lack of a chain saw stop him. He started pulling on gnarled tree limbs, trying to induce 'tree fatigue' (a newly invented phenomenon related to to 'metal fatigue') by pulling the limbs back and forth. He jumped on the tree, sometimes asking Tess to join him to use their combined weight to destroy the tree.

It worked.

In a matter of minutes, the fig tree had been reduced to four main trunks and a large pile of severed limbs. I never knew a tree could be dismembered without any tools. Well, now I know. I took pictures which were dropped off for developing yesterday. Watch soon for the pix on my web site.

(well, pix will go on-line after I find the SCSI cable to connect the scanner. Without the cable, my scanner has been transformed into a large paperweight).

Stacey