Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Tam is speaking of the current ice storm happening

in her neck of the woods, and it reminded me of something:
Few years back we had a nasty one(nothing like 2", thank your favorite Deity) here in cental/eastern OK, then one in which my neighborhood had no power for a week and others for longer. Once things had settled down afterward I ran by a surplus store over in Midwest City to look around(where I found the stylish milsurp longhandles I'm wearing now) and was talking to the owners about the mess.

They'd just moved into their home about a year before, and one of the first things they did was hire a tree company to cut things back fairly drastically, and take a couple of trees out, which caused extreme upset among some of the neighbors. Comments ranged from "You took too much off!" to one old guy having a fit: "That tree there has been growing for forty years!", etc. They'd lost power due to a line being broken down the street, but no limbs down; lots of the neighbors lost limbs, a few trees, and the old guy who'd been so pissed about them taking a tree down had a big limb through his kitchen roof.

When I moved into this house no attention had been paid to the trees in back for years; they needed some general cutting back and a bunch of stuff was up to-over the power lines. OKC does a big trash pickup once a month, and for about six months after, and a couple in the spring, I had effing huge piles of branches out front for them. In the ice storm I lost one branch, which didn't hit anything valuable. It's an ongoing task, but every year there's been some kind of storm that made me damn glad I've kept it up.

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