The Tree Saga

On Tuesday morning Oct 26th the wind was a blowin'.  The tornado siren went off for the first time since we moved here.  Heather was already at school because she goes early every Tuesday but luckily Brent was still home.  Brent, the boys and I all went down to the basement.  Geoffrey and Brian were scared until Brent said "Guess you'll have to play on the PS2."  They happily played video games for the next half hour.  At this point Brent is running late for work but is worried about the wind and storms.  He goes outside to look around and notices that the tree right next to the driveway/garage has a split forming down the middle.  As the wind blew the crack would open up by about an inch and then close up again.  It was obvious that half of the tree was going to come down onto the garage before the end of the day.  Brent preemptively cut down the limbs threatening the garage.  Here are a couple pictures of the tree after he cut off half of it.

We called our landscaper and he was able to have a crew come on Saturday morning (Oct 30th) and take out the damaged tree.  Here they are deciding on the best way to cut the trunk.  If you look closely you can see a crack in the bark down the middle of the tree.  We are so lucky that Brent caught this before it was too late.

We had them plant an autumn blaze maple (farther from the garage than the original tree was).  Here are a couple pics of the new tree.  It looks kind of spindly because it's already lost most of it's leaves but it's going to be beautiful when it grows up.