i came home to my parents place today to discover that crews were burning pine-beetle trees they had chopped down a few weeks ago behind my house in the gulley. a spark from those fires started a fire on the top of a really old, really big, dead tree that my family all loved. the crew had to chop it down just now so the fire wouldn't spread. its kinda sad. that tree was dead long before we moved here (24 years ago) and remainded standing, even while perchted on a steep slope. when i was young, the tree scared the crap out of me because it had few branches and was dead from top to bottom - it looked like something out of a horror movie - like a haunted tree. it was even the backbone of a few forts i used to build as a kid. i figured it would stand forever. damn. oh well - its just a tree
oh and the jackass german from across the gulley (he was also my accounting prof and used to yell at me for building forts as a kid) refuses to let the crew cut down a pine-beetle tree on his property so this might end up being all for nothing.