It's going down, I'm yelling Timber?

If you hadn't heard or don't care about pointless things like I do, this year has been one of the worst for webworms. If your friends are like mine you might be the butt of some jokes if you walk around spouting off that information, so be careful. Now one tree in my backyard got covered with especially bad with webworms and after spraying and spraying the little devils, I couldn't keep it from getting dangerously close to dying without taking down most of the branches. Seeing as it's close to pointless to have a tree with no branches, it was time to break out the chainsaw and cut that bad boy down to the ground. 

Now I take my weekends pretty seriously when it comes to how I spend my time. A quarter of it is spent at places where you have to be over the age of 21 to enter, another 50 percent of it is on the level of laziness that would make a crippled sloth look productive and the rest is spent actually accomplishing something or kicking myself for not getting more done. So of course I slept in most of the morning that Saturday, which didn't let me and my roommate start till 1pm, right when the sun was kicking Oklahoma in the face with some good old fashion scorching humidity. But hey, no biggie, we have a chainsaw and it’s going to be easy peasy lemon squeezy!  

Wrong.

About two minutes into cutting the chainsaw broke. That left us with a handsaw meant for cutting boards, a pick-ax and some pretty sour attitudes.  I can't remember the specifics of what all was said for the next several hours, but I know it would've been a shame if any small children were present to hear it. But finally the tree was down, next up was the "easy" part: digging up the stump of a tree that was roughly 30 years old, out of the Oklahoma dirt, and in the middle of the F@#$%*! summer. 

Another hour or so later, we had it dug up cut up and we were done. The hole was filled in and we were finally over the chore the ecosystem of outer-suburban Oklahoma had dealt us. After another forty-five minutes of standing in front of my freezer with the door open, I was back to my normal routine.

So if you ever find yourself need to do some amateur lumberjacking of your own take these tips to keep you sane.

• Make sure all your equipment is working
• Don't wait until the afternoon to get started
• Make sure the ground is saturated around the stump, will make digging up the ground around it easier.

But the main thing is to try to be proactive. It's never really fun to lose a tree that’s older than you just because of some damn worms. So next summer I'll be starting early spraying all the trees for a more preventative approach.