The Masked Bandit

A couple of month's ago, I re-read "Where the Red Fern Grows," a great novel about 10 year old Billy Colman and his two coon dogs, Old Dan and Little Ann.  I tell you, if you don't get choked up reading that book, you have ice water running in your veins.  Billy loves his dogs and his dogs love him.  They all love treeing coons, too.

I have a lot of bad experiences with raccoons.  They are a very smart, formidable foe.  Back when I was crawfishing for a living, they cost me lots of money.  At night they would forage through my ponds, eating crawfish out of my traps - crawfish that I could have otherwise sold.  To add insult to injury, they would turn over traps.  Being unable to see the traps, I would then run over with my boat, flattening them out at a cost of $8.50 per trap.  In the early mornings, I would walk through a patch of woods that bordered my crawfish ponds.  The coons, with bellies full of crawfish, would sleep in the crooks of trees.  I would see them and shoot them out of the treetops and they would plummet to the ground with a loud thud.  They gave me fits.

They also, I've learned, will kill your chickens.  This afternoon late, I walked to the henhouse to collect eggs.  The girls' laying has diminished.  Many are broody and the rest are just hot and tired.  I picked up 8 eggs today.  When I came out of the henhouse with my basket, I heard a rustling noise in the grass in the woods adjacent to our property.  It was a juvenile raccoon trying to get in through the fence.  I scared the rascal.

I'm unlike Billy Colman in that I don't have two redbone coonhounds.  I opened up the back gate running after the coon.  The coon did what coons do - he scampered up a tree and watched me.  Can you see him in the 'V' in the tree right in the very center of the photo below?

I ran as quick as I could to get my 12 gauge shotgun and ran back.  Without dogs like Old Dan and Little Ann at the bottom of the tree, I was worried the masked bandit might have climbed down and escaped.  But no - he was still up in the crook of the tree looking down at me.  Waiting, I'm sure, for me to leave so that he could have a nice chicken dinner.

The rascal will not be eating chicken dinner tonight, or any night in the future.  I took aim, pulled the trigger - BOOM!, and the raccoon fell to the forest floor with a resounding thud.

Tricia said he was cute and maybe she's right, but this cute fellow is a chicken eater, and I can't abide with that type of neighbor.  I have to think that Billy Colman, Old Dan and Little Ann would agree.

A Sound in the Night

Monday night was a typical night.  After supper, we sat down, as has been our latest routine, in watching an episode or two of Gunsmoke.  We began at the very beginning of the series when John Wayne introduced James Arness playing US Marshal Matt Dillon.  We were watching Matt and Miss Kitty and Doc and Chester when all of a sudden, we heard a loud shaking sound.

Tricia and I looked at one another.  It sounded as if someone was trying to come into the house through one of the doors.  It was scary.  I ran and got my pistol and began a quick search to see what was going on.  Tricia turned on all the floodlights outside.  We couldn't find the source of the noise.  Unsettled, I went to bed with my pistol on the bedside table.

The sun rose the next morning, and we went out and fed the animals and milked the goats and cow.  We fed the chickens and opened the nesting boxes and came inside to have coffee and read the Bible before starting our day and going off to work.  We were still puzzled about the night's mysterious noise.  That is, until I looked outside the front porch.

Mystery solved!  Overnight, even though the weather was still and quiet, a rotten center of an oak tree limb had given way and the large limb fell all the way to the ground.  It was this noise that gave us a scare the night before and not some nighttime bandit.  When it hit the ground, it shook the house!

I was grateful on one account that there was no villain lurking around "Dodge City," but on the other hand I was looking at a lot more than a large limb on the ground.  I was looking at a lot of work!

The limb had fallen from quite a ways up in the tree.  Gravity had taken her down to the ground quickly.

As I looked at the task ahead, I made an inventory of what I'd need.  Basically, I'd need my chainsaw.  It's a Greenworks 80 volt 18 inch chainsaw.  I would've never thought a battery-powered chainsaw was up to the job, but this little tool has proven itself time and again.  I brought the saw and some bar and chain oil and began limbing the tree out, hauling the tree tops out to the pasture for the goats and cows to make quick work of.

It was slow going at first, but if you keep at the job with persistence, you start seeing the fruits of your labors.

A little later on and the fallen tree limb had transformed itself into firewood for a 2027 winter day.

With the job complete and out of the way, we watched Gunsmoke tonight without any interruption!

The Light of the World

This morning we had a meaningful service at our little country church.  It's a tradition we've done for quite some time.  We call it the "Lighting of the Tree."  We have a normal Morning Worship Service, with Bible Study, singing of old hymns and carols, prayer and a message.  This morning's message was on Luke 1 beginning in verse 26 when the angel Gabriel was sent to announce to Mary about her being chosen to give birth to the Christ Child.  The angel told Mary, "The Lord is with you."    He went on to tell her the great news that she, a virgin, had been chosen to give birth to the Messiah.  Mary, of course, had lots of questions.  Before leaving, the angel told her, "With God, nothing is impossible!"

At the end of the message, the lights are dimmed and a big candle on top of the tree, representing Jesus, is lighted.  600 years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah was speaking to Israel.  Due to their idolatry and unbelief, they had been taken into captivity by the Assyrians.  They were in dark times.  Isaiah had hope, though:

But there will be no more gloom for her who was in anguish; in earlier times He treated the land of Naphtali with contempt, but later on He shall make it glorious, by the way of the sea, on the other side of the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles.  The people who walk in darkness will see a great light; Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them.  Isaiah 9:1-2

In Matthew 4:12-16 we see Jesus' inauguration of His ministry fulfilling this prophecy.  Jesus had many "I AM" statements: I AM the Good Shepherd, I AM the way, the truth, and the life, I AM the gate, I AM the Bread of Life, I AM the resurrection and the life.  One other I AM statement was Jesus saying, "I AM the Light of the World."

The theme of Jesus as the Light of the world is prominent in New Testament Scripture: 

• John 1:4-5
• John 8:12
• John 9:5
• John 12:46

Jesus was truly the Son of God and came to the world to save sinners.  In Matthew 5:14-16 Jesus gives the believer a challenge for the ages!  Go shine your light before men.  Illuminate the darkness.  Live lives that point to Jesus.  Be intentional about shining your light.  Give all glory to God.

At the conclusion of Scripture reading, our church family is invited, one by one to come to the front and light a candle to represent the light of Jesus living within believers and a commitment to shine our lights for Christ.

It is a quiet time, a reflective time as the candles on our tree are lit, one by one, as the piano is softly played.

The tree was constructed by the father of the gentleman in the photo above many years ago.

Even though our church is small, it took quite a while for everyone to get their candles lit.  There was no rush though.  It was a peaceful, worshipful moment.

One thing important about a light, if you take a lighthouse, for example.  The light keeps people from being shipwrecked onto the rocks.  The light also gives guidance so that those who are lost, may find their way home.

Jesus is that perfect Light!  Shine, Jesus, Shine.  May we shine for You in all we do.

Giving the Live Oaks a Haircut

As our high temperatures aren't in the 90's anymore, it's opened up some items on my to-do list that I didn't want to attempt in the sweltering heat.  One of those chores is trimming the live oaks.  I like to clean up the suckers that grow off of the horizontal limbs.  Doing so gives the tree a cleaner look.  The goats really like when I do this as I throw the branches into the pasture where they make quick work of the leaves.  

The main tool I use for this is a 10 foot extendable electric chainsaw with an 8 inch blade.  The hard part is getting up to the branches to trim, but that's accessible with a tall ladder.  Being that the chainsaw is electric, you don't have to worry about it not starting or the carburetor being gummed up.  The main thing is to keep the chain sharpened and I do that with a 'rat-tail' file.  It gets the job done on smaller branches.  This electric chainsaw cost me $69, and it has paid for itself time and again.  I can't say enough about how faithfully this saw has performed.

Once I got the smaller suckers removed, I began to look for the next low hanging fruit.  There was a big dead branch.  We have a concrete bench directly underneath it that seemed like a bad place to be sitting for when that big branch gave way.  Time to cut that down.  This branch is too big in diameter to do with a chainsaw with an 8 inch bar.  I precariously set a ladder so that I climb up and lean over and get in position to cut it off.  I try to do this type thing when Tricia is inside as she gets nervous when I'm up in the tree.

You can see the fresh, clean cut way up there.  I moved the bench and flowers so that I wouldn't crush them when the limb was felled.

Since this limb was bigger, it requires a bigger saw.  This is a Greenworks 80 volt battery powered saw with an 18 inch bar.  This thing cuts beautifully.  It's quiet and efficient.  The battery might last 20 minutes, but I have another battery inside charging as I drain the first one.  It keeps me cutting.  I've been pleased with this saw as well.  I had been sharpening each chain for years, but it was finally time to put new chains on both of the saws.  Wow!  What a difference it makes to have a new chain on it!

With a loud thud, the big dead branch landed on the ground.  It did crush Tricia's plant hanger and a decorative flag, but I did my best to straighten them up.

I recharged the 80 volt battery and quickly cut up the live oak logs into fireplace sized pieces.  I'll also give the logs time to season and then I'll split them.  These logs went into a wagon and were pulled back by the fire pit.

Coupling this with a ton of firewood leftover from last year and we're pretty much set for the fireplace this winter.

Johnny "Mulberry Seed"

I grew up hearing the folk legend about Johnny Appleseed, a man who traveled across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and even into Canada planting apple trees.  I like to plant trees.  In fact, I dug up a bunch of live oak trees that were growing in the flower beds and put them in pots.  We'll plant them strategically after they've grown bigger.  

In the late afternoon, we've been over the fence on the property that borders ours.  There's a little patch of woods and I've been checking out the dewberries growing along the woods.  Dewberries, in my opinion, are even better than blackberries.  They are sweeter and more plump.  

Dewberries in almost every stage, from green to almost ripe

Dewberries, when ripened are soft and can burst in your hand, staining your fingers purple.  

We like to go out to the woods with cups and pick dewberries, eating a few, but bringing most inside.  I've been thinking about how good a warm dewberry cobbler with ice cream on top would taste!  We've been enjoying them for breakfast blended with bananas and honey in a goatmilk kefir smoothie.

But back to Johnny Appleseed.  While walking in the woods picking dewberries, a young tree caught my eye.  I had been watching it for a couple of years.  It is the tree you see below leaning over our fence from the neighboring property.  It is leaning way over to try to get some sunlight.  The privet, Chinaberry, and Chinese tallow trees all compete for sunlight in that little stretch of woods.

I had my suspicions of this tree for a while now.  The leaves almost confirmed its identity, but I needed one more thing to confirm my suspicions - fruit.  And there it was.  Mulberries!  You can see the ripening berries below.

So here is the story behind the mulberry tree.  A few years ago, a milk customer would always bring us big bowls of blackberries that he picked.  They were delicious.  He would even bring some to a friend of his in Oberlin that made Blackberry wine.  Well, one day he brought me a tall cup full of mulberries.  He instructed me not to eat them, but instead, to go back in the woods and scatter them so that they would grow.  That's exactly what I did.  (Well, I DID eat a few of them.)

I remember as a kid, my grandma and grandpa had a big mulberry tree that bordered their property.  We would eat those mulberries until we couldn't eat any more.  Our hands were stained purple and so were our shirts and lips and tongue.  The birds loved mulberries, too, and they would make quite a mess around the mulberry tree.  

Anyway, the mulberry tree that is now growing is in the general location of where I scattered them several years ago.  I was happy to see success in the mulberry propagation project.  

There's a nice, ripe, purple one.  I'm gonna get it before the birds have a chance to eat it.  There aren't very many mulberries on the little tree yet, but we look forward to future years as the little tree continues to grow.  I'm so glad that I didn't eat that cup of mulberries, but planted most of them.  Good things come to those who wait, I guess.  Johnny Appleseed would be proud.

Foul Weather Wednesday

We knew it was coming.  We expected it.  Last night we watched the weather report.  We like to make fun of how weather forecasters miss it, but they nailed this one.  We woke up at 6 AM and were having coffee when we checked the weather.  Fierce storms had just gone through Lake Charles heading east (toward us) with a massive front line with damaging straight line winds.  

We put down our coffee and got outside with the quickness.  I'll show you the bad news first.  It's not really bad, just unfortunate.  We were blessed.  We lost a medium-sized pecan tree in the pasture.  It blew across the fence that separates us and our neighbor to the east.

The pecan tree broke off a Chinese tallow tree on the fence line before going down.  This might look sad and unfortunate to you.  It is.  But what it really looks like is a lot of work!  We'll have to get this all cleaned up.

With that out of the way, let's rewind and I'll show you where Tricia and I hunkered down as the storm passed over.  It was IN the chicken tractor.  When we put our coffee down and got outside, our first thoughts went to our Cornish Cross meat birds.  They are two weeks old.  The chicken tractor is staked down, but rain water quickly saturates the ground.  If straightline winds are strong enough, it'll pull the stakes right out of the ground and flip the tractor over.  

In the midst of the thunder, lightning, rain and winds, this is where we were:

The tractor had a tarp over it and we were inside, trying to hold it down while the wind tried to pick it up.  It turned it sideways and several times, I thought we were toast.  We were praying and I had a fleeting thought that if someone's roof comes off to the west of us, we will wake up in heaven.  

The birds (and us) were soaking wet.  They were shaking and had their eyes closed and had hypothermia.  We've got to get them warmed up but there was one big problem.  The electricity, we could see, was out in the house.  We loaded them in buckets and set up the brooder in the garage.  Tricia began to try to warm them up by drying them off with an old t shirt.

I got our solar generator out.  Fortunately it was 100% charged.  We plugged in both heat lamps and the beleaguered birds began to rally.

The power stayed out for about six hours, but the solar generator did a wonderful job and we didn't lose a single bird out of the 32 in total.  What a lifesaver!

In no time at all the birds destroyed the garage, pooping all over the place.  I had to bleach the garage to clean up the area in the afternoon.

Somewhere around 3 PM the lights came back on.  Hooray!  Not only that, but the skies turned blue and the sun came out.  What a change!  A neighbor came by and said the winds had been clocked at 80 MPH.  He laughed when I told him we rode out the storm with the chicks.

We moved them back into the chicken tractor once we were pretty sure that the storm had passed over.  I think they enjoy being back out on grass.  We count in a blessing that we didn't lose any birds.

In what started out to be a day on which the weather was foul, we counted our blessings, because everything turned out alright.

Merry and Bright

Our family celebrated our Savior's birth and all the festivities that surround it.  We purposefully try to keep things low key and simple.  We had a nice worship service on Christmas Eve, entitled Jesus, the Light of the World.  At the end of the service, everyone comes up and lights a candle on the tree to signify Matthew 5:16.  It is an old tradition at our church and is always a moving service.

Way out in the country in Hathaway, Louisiana, there is a family that puts up lots of Christmas lights - 4 acres of lights to be exact.  We walked around and looked at all of the beautiful lights.

It is amazing that people will put in the time and effort and expense to put up lights for the community to enjoy.  Truly a sight to see!  My photos just don't do it justice.

We had already made tamales, but had some baking to do.  First we made pumpkin empanadas and almond crescents.  Then we made Gingerbread men.  We always get a kick out of decorating them.

Here is a special one I made for Benjamin.  It is a Benjamin Gingerbread man CT scan, showing the titanium rods in his spine and legs.  

Then we made baklava.  This is a favorite dish of ours.  It is tedious with 10 individual layers of phyllo dough followed by a mixture of pecans, coconut, sugars and spices, followed by 10 more layers of phyllo and another layer of the pecan mixture and 10 more layers of phyllo dough.  We slice it and bake it.  Then we pour a diluted honey solution over it and let it soak in overnight.

The resulting confection is a sticky-sweet delicious dessert.  Look at the flaky layers.

We enjoyed spending time with family and being thankful for the many blessings in our lives, first and foremost, the birth of the Messiah, Jesus!

If A Tree Falls In the Woods...

In what has become a biennial event, the red oak borer beetle has taken out another one of our oak trees.  It has been weakened for several years.  This spring it gave up the ghost.  It stands a skeleton of it's former glory.  The oak tree to the right of it was subservient to it, leaning over to gain some access to sunlight.  Now, perhaps, it will resume a more stately shape, until the borer beetle takes it out, too.

The dead tree once served as one side of the base of the zip line, or shoot to shoot, as we called it.  Our kids zipped down the cable many times, coming to an abrupt stop at the American flag on the barn.  I think that if the tree knew that the kids were counting on it to hold up the base of the zip line, it might have held out a few more years.  But the kids are grown and the big tree that served as the launching point of the zip line succumbed to the red oak borer beetle several years ago.  Time marches on.

I put off cutting down the tree as long as I possibly could.  However, big limbs started falling out of the tree and onto the barn.  A couple limbs arched precariously over the fence, threatening to fall on their grandchildren's trampoline.  I figured the neighborly thing to do was to take the old tree down.  I called a tree service from my hometown.  The proprietor's sister and I graduated from high school together.  He and his wife do this business on the side.  They came while I wasn't home one morning and put the tree on the ground for a price tag of $500.  I feel like that was a reasonable price.

Compare the photo above with the photo below.  It is a weight off my mind that the tree was felled.  There was really only one direction that it could go, and they put it on the ground in the prescribed location.  With the bucket truck and two chain saws running, it took them no time.  They did seek permission from my neighbor and they accessed the tree from my neighbor's back yard.

As we always request, the tree service laid the tree on the ground.  We'll cut it up ourselves and then I'll split it for firewood.  As the old saying goes, "Firewood warms you at least four times.  One to cut it down, Two to split it, Three to stack it, and Four to burn it."  We use a chainsaw rarely, so I always borrow my Dad's or on an occasion or two, I would rent one for $50 per day and would bring it back the same day.  The hardware store no longer rents them out, though.

Since it isn't very smart to buy a machine with a small engine that isn't used frequently, I was reading reviews for a battery-powered chainsaw.  This one had very good reviews, so I jumped on it.

It's an 80 volt chainsaw with an 18 inch bar.  When I paid the tree service for the work, I asked him his opinion of these saws.  I guess I should've asked before buying, but he told me that they use them in his line of work all the time.  He said you'll be tired out before the chainsaw loses its charge.  He told me as long as I kept the blade sharp and bar oil in the reservoir, the saw would make me proud.  I asked if the saw was too small to cut up the tree?  He told me no.  He said he cut the tree down with a smaller chain saw.

That's just what I needed to hear.  I'll be charging up the battery and will cut up the tree so that when cooler weather comes around in the fall, I can pull out my double-sided ax, wedge and sledgehammer and get busy splitting firewood for the winter.  As bad as I hated to see the tree go, we were smack-dab out of firewood.  And that reminds me, I need to call a chimneysweep.  We haven't had our chimney cleaned in several years.  It's almost laughable that I'm talking firewood and chimneysweeps when it is 107 outside!

I'll Probably Regret it

The Watering Hole

It hasn't rained on the homestead in 3 weeks.  The grass is getting parched.  Here we are a week into June and I've only mowed the yard one time.  The lawn mower has cobwebs on it.  I'd be pulling your leg if I told you that it was only the drought that's kept me from mowing - it's not only the drought.  Each spring I have a little competition to see how long I can go without mowing.  I put up temporary fencing and let the cows cycle through the yard several times.  They do an adequate job of mowing.  My new excuse for not mowing is our honeybees.  Why would I want to chop up all the white dutch clover and other flowers that the pollinators love?  

The photo at the head of this article shows our water trough.  It's really a repurposed molasses tub that I have fitted with a float valve.  It holds about 35 gallons.  Two cows can fit their heads in at one time to drink.  The others must patiently wait their turn.  Do you remember waiting in line to drink from the water hose after a backyard football game?  You'd be so thirsty!  But you would have to let the hose run for a minute until it got cold.  That's the general idea of the water trough.

If you look at the picture, there is shade over the water.  It is peaceful.  A veritable oasis in an otherwise arid land.  If I was of the bovine persuasion, I'd stand there and swish my tail, chew my cud, and take long slow sips of clear water to wash down the fermented grass I was chewing on.  The water hole is a sacred spot.  When cows are drinking, I never want to disturb them or rush them.  Lots of important things happen by the 'well.'  In the Bible, the woman at the well experienced a life changing event.  She found living water at that well and never thirsted again.

You'll notice the nice shade over the blue tub of water.  It wasn't always there.  I am big on planting trees.  A fox squirrel buried a pecan one year and forgot where he buried it in our yard.  It grew.  I transplanted it in a pot and then planted it at the corner of the pasture and the garden.  Now that I think about it, I didn't think that all the way through.  The tree has grown.  It does cast nice shade over the water hole.  There are some downsides, though.  The tree will send out roots that will compete with the vegetables for rainwater.  The shade will, later on, cast shade over the garden, blocking out sunlight.  

I'll probably regret it.  But at the same time, the cows enjoy the shade.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” — Greek Proverb

The Disappearing Stump

Our oldest son, Russ, had catastrophe strike a little over a year ago when Hurricane Laura hit the area.  The neighbor of his had a big water oak tree that was rotten in the middle.  When to strong winds blew, the weakened tree succumbed to the hurricane force winds and fell directly on Russ' roof.  It took many many months to get a contractor and materials to make his home whole again.  But alas, it is done.  Looks real nice, too!

Russ had a smaller water oak tree in his front yard.  It was slightly more than two feet in diameter.  The tree was healthy, but Russ didn't want to go through another tree on his roof.  He called a tree service and they chopped the tree down.  The front yard definitely looked a lot different.  One thing the tree service didn't remove was the stump.  He could have called a stump-grinding service, but he didn't.

He did something that I'm afraid my hard-headed self taught him.  He took the stump out the hardest way possible - by hand.  We've done it here at our house.  It is done with stubborn determination.  That's a nice way to put it.  One might also call it some less flattering words.  I had read that a good way to remove a stump is to drill a bunch of holes in the top of the stump, pour a gallon of cooking oil into the holes, let it soak it up and then light it.  Trouble is, that did not work very well.

Russ went to the tried and true way to do it - using an ax mainly.  The ax is used to chop slivers of the stump off.  You keep doing this round and round the tree.  Over time the diameter of the tree is being slowly reduced.  Th chips are saved, piled on top of the stump, and used to burn the stump each day.  He also used a sledgehammer and a wedge to chop the stump.

A few days ago, we received the following text from him: "My stump is missing!  I can't find it"

There is only a hole in the ground where the stump once was.  Three ax handles, numerous blisters, and gallons of sweat later, the stump was gone!

It is a testament, I think, of persistence, hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and endurance.  Maybe it is a bit of insanity, too, in following after my crazy methods of doing things.  What can I say?  He's a chip off the old stump block!  It is pleasing to see the fruits of your labors.  No more stump!

He will plant another tree in its place - one that isn't known for falling on homes.  

The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock

When I was a kid in Sunday School, we learned the song, "The Wise Man Built His House Upon the Rock."

The wise man built his house upon the rock,

The wise man built his house upon the rock,

The wise man built his house upon the rock,

And the rains came tumbling down!

The rains came down and the floods came up,

The rains came down and the floods came up,

The rains came down and the floods came up,

And the house on the rock stood firm.

Of course the song was about building your life, your hopes, your dreams, your eternity on faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  Many people build their "houses" on the shifting sands of success, money, recognition, fame, and the like.  When storms come, their houses are decimated.  When eternity comes calling, well, those that don't know the Lord will be tragically separated from God.

In today's post, I'll show a few more storm damage photos.  As we drove down the road, the first thing we came to was our church.  We noticed that our sign had blown over and that many shingles were missing, but the main thing was that the high winds had blown our steeple over.

Superficial damage, mainly.  There was some ceiling damage to the church along with other minor issues, but really not much compared to many other people nearby.

We drove on to Welsh, Louisiana, a town 10 miles to our west where our son, Russ, lives.  Hurricane Laura moved in to the coast about 40 miles south and west of us.  The closer you move west, the more destruction.  We were saddened when we drove up to Russ' home.  His neighbors had a large water oak tree that fell over his house and onto his roof, puncturing the roof in numerous places.

You can see in the photo below that the tree was hollowed out and weak and should have been cut down prior to the storm.

While we were sad for a minute, we began to work to clear the tree from his house.  The whole family pitched in to work.  It was hot, but we pressed on.  

We pulled limbs to the side of the road, building a big windrow that blocked off the view of the road.  The town crews will come to pick up the limbs.  They've got their work cut out for them (pardon the pun.)

Slowly, we made headway.  Inch by inch, it's a cinch!  

As more and more of the tree was removed, we could clearly see the extent of the damage.  When the tree fell through the roof, it damaged the house structurally and it rained in the house, causing more damage.

Thankfully, Russ has insurance and the adjuster has already come to inspect the damage.  We pray that Russ will be made whole.  

When we finished, we realized that the larger parts of the tree would have to be removed by professionals.  The large parts of the trunk leaned against the house and threatened additional damage.

The goal was to remove the tree and put up a tarp to prevent further damage by rainfall.

At the end of the day, I think we accomplished that.  Although Russ is sad, so many people lost so much more.  We are truly blessed and grateful.