The View From Here

I've been getting high again.


This time my high times were on the opposite side of the house from my last high post about power washing. There is a magnificent live oak in front of PFHQ that gives us electric bill lowering shade ... and we appreciate that, we really do.

However, some of the branches have grown so close to the chimney that they rub up against the spark arresting doofliggy on top. If you go out at night when a log fire is burning inside PFHQ, it's easy to see that not all sparks are arrested.

One or two glowing sparks slip out from time to time. Even though live oaks are not especially combustible, it's just poor form to have trees growing into your chimney.


Here we see an adult B.A.Ladder teaching it's offspring to climb. Little is known about the life cycle of B.A. Ladders ... these may be the only existing photos of the adult with it's young.

The ladder is strapped to the porch, so everybody calm down. It can't go anywhere, although I possibly could.

On this day, my task was to use the extendable pruning saw to trim away the encroaching live oak branches and make the chimney safe for escapee sparks again. I do this one-handed, with the other arm securely locked around the rungs of the ladder and my center of mass pressed into the rungs.

It's not that bad actually.

Whenever I get this ladder out, I like to take pics to share with you since the perspective from above is so different ... duh.

Way to state the obvious, huh?

I always take my cell phone up and send out a few pics to friends just to be chastised by text messages ... good fun.

Below is the view looking out over the front of the house towards the parking zone.

You can see the waterfolly where the bench sits, and beyond it, someone leaving down our sandy track out to the county road. This area and an equal area behind the house is all that we mow here at PFHQ. The rest of the land is wild.

The view above is looking down slope (barely a slope, but a slope nonetheless). If you followed that leafy, shade dappled path, you would emerge into the light ... see the sunny opening?

At that point you would be standing in front of the "pond", which I'm happy to say is finally saturated enough to hold some big puddles. If this hurricane season would just stop goofing off and rev up, we could have a full pond in no time.

Not wishing anybody death and destruction, but a nice stalled tropical system with continuous sheets of rain ... oh, say about 16 inches over a couple of days, like Tropical Storm Frances left us in '04 ... yes, that would be just the ticket.