We had some weather come through Our Fair Cities last night around midnight. It’s been raining a bit lately, and the first thing Minnesota trees like to do after it’s raining and a good flat wind comes through is fall over. And so they did, although some claim it was the lightening that done it. Since I had offered to help cut up trees that one day at the Hennepin County History Museum, I knew that my chainsaw had oil, my reciprocating saw had a wicked pruning blade in it, and I’d found an extra 50′ of extension cord hiding in the basement. In short, I was ready to cut trees — well, except, of course, that I could really stand to put a new chain in the chainsaw, but we don’t hafta go there. I made a couple o’ offers, only one of which was excepted, for which I am quite grateful, and off I went to adjust the chain on the chainsaw, and load it all up in the trunk of my Baby^tm car so I could drive the two blocks to help chop up a tree that had not only knocked a fence down, but that had the temerity to fall on a garage!

When I got there with my chainsaw and my reciprocating saw, and my two extension cords, my friends’ neighbor was attempting to cut up a mulberry tree that had collapsed on top of the garage roof and just about filled up their yard. He’d ran out and bought a Ryobi saw, in that nice fluorescent green that they use, and he was manfully chopping off branches with a little bitty multi-purpose blade designed for cutting through anything, like iron pipe or wood with lottsa nails in it, but that would take a month o’ Sundays to chop off much of that mulberry tree with a four inch blade.

My reciprocating saw, which I bought from Sears on a Slickdeals price alert, also came with a small multi-purpose blade, but when I knew I was gonna cut me some trees down at the museum, I ran to Menards to find something with teeth — and long. Ain’t nothing makes a man feel gooder than a wicked toothed saw blade that’s long too. Well, OK, it also cuts through green wood real slick, although the first nail you hit would probably strip half a dozen o’ those wicked teeth off the blade, but until you hit that first nail, it’s like going into town on Saturday night. So anyway, we cut wood. In the full sun. On a hot day. In a back yard where this damned mulberry tree just fell over on account of it being wet, rotten, and hit by a flat wall o’ wind. (I think I used my chainsaw only once, to cut through a really thick branch.)

After about an hour of cutting wood in the hot sun in the back yard, I think I started to notice it was warm. One of the first clues was the sweat that started dripping into my eyes. Working as I do under an air vent in an air-conditioned office (for some values of air-conditioned — ittsa green building, which is really funny when you think about it ’cause ain’t none of it painted green nor green carpeted either — and for goodness sake, let’s not start talking about the toilets.) So anyway, we drank some refreshments, and I kinda hid under the umbrella for the last half hour of the tree cutting, but by then it was pretty much chopped up and off the roof, except for the big trunk which is laying across the yard. When I left, I left the long blade with the wicked teeth.