quasify

This particular weekend was odd, fairly up and down. It was good in that dog and I went to the park and went swimming, bad in that I failed to get some condo stuff done, good in that the baby nieces (& parents) are safely home from Italy, bad in that some jackass sideswiped my car smashing up the right front quarter panel.

All that said, the highlight of the weekend for me was doing some tree work on the red maple above. I haven’t had to do a lot of manual labor in my life, a standard inclination would assume this to be a good thing. I did though spend the summer after my junion year of college dead-broke, working for Mulford’s Tree Service in Lawrence. It was, by far, the physically hardest job I had ever had (or likely will ever have), dragging logs, chipping branches, carrying gear, driving a 3/4 ton bucket truck that needed a jump every time it had to be started. Mulford himself was taciturn to the extreme, indifferent towards me as long as I remembered to grease the saws. That was much preferred to the daily scorn with which his main climber treated me, engaging in a two-man class warfare battle that I didn’t even know I was fighting until well after I had long since lost it. This guy could climb anything, work at any height, fix every chainsaw, chipper or truck, and never once let a chance go by to (rightly, I suppose) remind me that I didn’t have a chance to meet his exacting standards to be successful in the tree business. It amuses me how so many years later this one boss still frequently comes back to mind whenever I’m working outdoors, cutting wood or clearing out brush. He was there in my head this weekend, disapproving of my tendencies to minimize the amount of effort that needs to be expended for a given job, forcing me towards the right path, not the easy way out. It’s not a stretch to say that (verbal abuse notwithstanding) this single summer spent working with tree cutters was more instructive in the appropriate way to actually do work than any other experience I had as an undergraduate. It’s something for which I’m grateful to have done. I’m also grateful that when it comes to taking down the 60′ half-dead oak leaning perilously over the back of house, I’ll know someone more responsible and capable that I will be calling the shots.