Category: Family

It is Friday evening (Aug 2) and I receive a call from Seb reminding me that he is arriving in Boston at 1:30am Saturday morning that was just a few hours from now…. Yeah, he told me but I completely spaced out and did not tell Ana and did not think about it. Fine men can take those surprises, as we did not have anything special planned anyways, so my biggest problem problem was to lay this news on Ana.
Well, I succeeded because I did mention about 4 weeks ago that Seb would come, but of course Ana was upset that I did not tell her earlier, and rightly so. Anyways I got the bed for Seb prepared and was waiting for him while the whole house had gone to sleep. I enjoyed some nice LPs with a cigar and it was a really nice chillaxing lonely hours until Seb indeed arrived around 1:30am and he was in good spirits.
We listened to some music meanwhile exchanging news on what was going on. One big topic was Martin’s ordeal with Alex and how that is going to play out in the end. Sad story, and the kids will suffer from this. I remember my own split from my first wife and remember how bad that was for me, but not even close to what this will be. At least we did not have kids and there was no money involved, and both parties actually very reasonable. It was as simple as it can possible get but still I would describe it as the worst experience of my life. With no kids you can just cut all connections and forget about it, but not so with kids, you are going to be linked over the kids basically forever. Anyway, they will figure it out, we drank a beer chilled a little while listening to ‘The Cult’ and talked about the plan for Saturday. I told Seb about my plan to cut down the second triplet on this weekend and he thought it was a great idea and said that it would be a great thing to do together.

Seb taking down the first limb.
It is a video (~150 MB).

We kind of collapsed around 3:30am and hit the hay. In the morning Seb was up pretty early and we both grabbed the kids and took them to Jam’n Java while Ana had the house to herself. When we got back we started to get ready for the second oak triplet. Seb was all gung-ho put on the climbing belt and ventured into the tree not without showing me his cool technique to automatically forward the ascenders 🙂
After some professional re-crotching he got started to rig the first branch. After all was prepared it was time to cut, and cut he did. The branch broke off but fell into one of the next trees and got stuck. Seb fixed that and finally the branch came down nicely dangling on the rigging rope. Seb used the ballay device and he was able to control the decent well. Meanwhile he had broke a sweat and was also complaining about his calf muscle that he had injured a few weeks back. So after the first branch he had to come down and I took over. The remaining pieces were done rather quickly after I figured out the rigging, while Seb was entertaining Ana and the kids and meanwhile cut up the big trunk I left the weekend before. He even created some art: a nice block of oak wood to expose some beautiful pieces or as a piece of art by itself. I might create a few more and also put some finishing touches on them to make the surface nice.
Later we had to quickly pick up Seb suites he left in the hotel in Winchester when he arrived a week ago and forgot there when he left for San Francisco. In the evening I dropped him off for the 10pm flight to Zuerich. It was a great day, good to see my brother and work with him, even better.

Last triplet standing, lots of wood on the ground.