October 15, 2010: I’ve had it with the ornamental pear tree next to our swimming pool. It drops seeds, branches, leaves, and everything else in the water. Time for it to go. Kirstin said we should hire a tree service to remove the 30-35 ft tree. Oh honey, no, no, no. There are a few things a man simply never does. A man never asks for directions. A man never watches the movie “Pride and Prejudice”. And a man never pays someone to do a job he is fully capable of doing himself. So today I got a 24 ft ladder from Lowe’s (You see, a man doesn’t buy the 32 ft ladder to cut down a 35 ft tree. That would be too easy. You get the smaller ladder because you go hard or you go home. And I’m hard like that. Plus the 24 ft ladder was way cheaper.) and I got a chain saw from Home Depot (You see, a man is set in his ways with name brands, especially with power tools. So I had to spend an extra hour going to Home Depot to get a Makita chain saw instead of getting a comparable Poulan chain saw from Lowe’s. Always a good decision in my book.). After working all day, I decided to make the resulting wood pile the subject of today’s Project 365 entry. The result of my efforts? Spent hundreds of dollars, toiled in the backyard for the entire day, twisted and sprained my ankle, cut my thumb, sprayed wood chips in my eyes (That was before I concluded that a man should wear eye protection. I was previously under the assumption that a man never wears those dorky looking specs), two lumps on my head from falling branches (I’m still undecided if a man should wear a hard hat.), and an assortment of scrapes and bruises. Oh and the tree? It’s still standing with only about a tenth of the branches removed. At this rate I should be done in about two months. See, a man does it his way...........Thank goodness Kirstin is out of town.

Built by the Carriage House at Cylburn Arboretum with help from friend and classmate Fernando Guerra. This simple rustic structure is a component of my final project for the Maryland Master Naturalist program, an educational & volunteer opportunity created by the University of Maryland Extension Program. For my project, I utilized my scenic design and set building skills to create a semi-permanent modular play area in which children can experiment with and discover natural building techniques and materials. It is intended to be offered alongside conversational curriculum about and physical examples of animal and bird nests and how they are an expression of the ecosystem. * We were given three posts of about six feet in length, a spade shovel and post-hole digger as our basic components to work with. I also bought a roll of sisal twine for this project, and local bamboo was harvested. Other supplemental tools used included a pruning saw intended for outdoor work, a Japanese-style pull saw (probably intended for indoor use, but which cut through bamboo much faster and more precisely than the pruning saw) and a Makita Lithium-Ion screw gun, and a pocket knife by Kershaw to cut twine. In the foreground is a 99 cent Arizona Iced Tea raspberry flavored...