Dad is gone

Dad took his last breath today .

  Sailing the boat he built .

1957 western Venezuela

2015 Freeport, Maine

Happier times

Today after a two and a half year gut wrenching struggle with cancer he is now back with his dog BJ again .

Bucking up one gigantic pine tree

 This week I have been working on cutting up some of the big pine trees Sunday's wind storm took down at my parents' place . Saturday I had Annie with me so she got some pictures of me cutting up the one that fell across the raspberry patch up by the road .

Those pines have a very shallow root system and the root ball just pulled out of the ground . It has to be twelve feet tall and sixteen feet across . Humongous when you stand next to it but not much when you consider the tree has to be about one hundred and twenty feet tall . The log has to be a good thirty six inches across at the stump where I am cutting .

The bar on my old Stihl W028 was not nearly long enough and I had to work it from both sides . Drove some wedges in the cut so it would not pinch the bar .

After a good bit of work I got through it and the stump starts to pull away from the log as the root ball springs back in to place .

Here is the next shot just as the stump is almost all the way upright . Note the dust cloud .

And with  a big dust cloud and a thump it went right back to where it has lived for the last two hundred years .

That is one big log .

Stump sitting back upright . That bit above ground is about five feet tall .  I'll cut a hole in the top and mom can plant flowers in it .

Limbing it out .

And bucking it up into lengths I can move .

A nice afternoon shot of the recently restored neighbor's place , our family connection to Maine . Used to belong to the family that took dad in during his college days back in the nineteen fifties . The old farm dates back to the mid seventeen hundreds .