The Ax Man Takes a Wife

Do you recall my previous post, in which J fancied himself a big bad ax man? Well, J kicked it up a notch, and by notch I mean, well, a few thousand notches. We went from this:



To this:



And the best part, aside from watching J run a chainsaw, was this:



Except, I was the one in the cab, and J was in the basket. And I was hoisting him to dizzying heights. And he had a chainsaw in the basket next to him, and the chainsaw was on the entire time.

I will admit, when I was first informed I would be running the man-lift, I was less-than-thrilled. I had better things to do. Like laundry. And dishes. And scrubbing toilets. But then I hopped up in that cab. Well, not really hopped so much as scrambled and huffed and puffed and crawled. Once I was in that seat, my whole world changed. I had power at my command. And that power was Heavy Equipment. I became an equipment operator, and just like that, the Ax Man had found his partner.

For two hours, I gleefully pushed and puller levers, moving J up and down as he whittled away at our dying Cottonwood. I have never loved him more. Huge limbs fell, making fantastic cracking and thudding noises. There was only one moment when a street sign may or may not have been hit by a falling log, and the sign may or may not have been bent, and J may or may not have hung on it like a monkey, yanking this way and that to straighten the sign.

At first, the prospect of hoisting my beloved high into the air scared the bejeepers out of me, but we settled into a rhythm, and sailed smoothly through the process. Well, there was that one instance when I started to move the basket down, and J jumped, grabbed on for dear life, and turned eyeballs the size of saucers on me. But it wasn't my fault. He gave me the hand signal for down, and that's what I did! Apparently in the 30 seconds between his signal and when I pushed the lever, he forgot! But he recovered right away, and we carried on. And this is the result:







It's a beautiful thing. And so is this, but you're just going to have to take my word for it, because my phone camera doesn't zoom. So you really can't appreciate it, but I do. Yes I do.



The Ax Man's work here is not done. And it won't be until the entire tree is gone. Despite our neighbor telling him that 'it looks perfect now, and maybe it'll even come back to life'. J has put the tree on his list, and no amount of input is going to remove it. That's just fine with me, because that means I might get to operate the man lift again.
And this year, I'm asking Santa for a new camera...

Happy Monday!
Love,
Mrs. Ax Man