Every now and again the floor quivers slightly.
It's because Broad Ripple's famous singing tree hippie is up with his chain saw taking chunks off the top of the dead silver maple out front and they plummet to the earth below with a ground-shaking *THUD!*
I pretend it's because the Boche are shelling the lines near our bunker. ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
All is quiet on the western front.
ReplyDeleteGerry
From the desk of Tamara Mitty.
ReplyDeletegvi
My dad used to climb the old acacia to lop off huge limbs that fell with a thunderous *THUD* and left a dent in the dirt.
ReplyDeleteAll I do is raise the "skirt" on a small redwood.
I had a full-grown silver maple go dead in a hard winter at my home some years back. It made the best firewood I have ever experienced.
ReplyDeleteDon't let it go to waste! Even firewood-length trunk pieces make great turned bowls, solid trugs and primitive butter molds, if you know a woodworker.
I'd advertise it on Craigslist and see if you can't convert some of it, in trade, into a work of art or two.
mikee, are you sure that was silver maple and not sugar maple? Sugar maple makes good wood. Silver maple is really brittle crap. It dies and breaks off easily. It's not very good for firewood. The only reason anyone plants it is because it grows quickly.
ReplyDeleteYou can use it as an excuse to reread Terry Pratchett's book by the same name.
ReplyDeleteLove the Thurber reference.
ReplyDeleteThis might be a good time to give your Webley-Vickers 50.80 a good cleaning.
ReplyDeleteIf you start digging a trench in the front yard......
ReplyDeleteI'll bring the SMLEs.....
ReplyDeleteYou must be thinking during the early years of the war because from 1917 on those 'Thuds' would have been every milisecond during an artillery barrage.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading a bunch of books about WWI now because next year is the Centennial Anniversay of that Stupidity.
As wars go (and all wars are stupid) WWI achieved the absolute maximum in governmental, military and social stupidity that in my opinion has yet to be reached....unless, of course, you include ObamaCare...
All The Best,
Frank W. James
Frank,
ReplyDeleteAllow me to recommend Eye-Deep in Hell and British Butchers & Bunglers of World War One.
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War by Gordon Corrigan
ReplyDeletegvi
As long as the 'incoming' stays short rounds, you're okay... :-)
ReplyDeleteBoche en bois, eh?
ReplyDeleteAm I the ONLY one who got the Walter Mitty reference?!
ReplyDeleteWhat a world...
gvi
WV: xporated (adj). Word used by BMV and Lake County (IN) worker bees, syn: expired. I'm sorry sir, yo' permit done xporated las' week.
GVI: Wasn't much point to mentioning it after you and pax did.
ReplyDeleteThe Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I