We Tree Kings

The tree trimming company that works for our electric utility put a note on our door telling us they would soon be in our neighborhood. I called them and asked for a special favor. I had two trees that were all tangled up in the electric service lines that ran from the power pole to the back of my house.  (I have learned this is called your home's "service entrance" by the way.)  The owner of the company came to the house to take a look and agreed that we had a problem, and a few days later his entire entourage showed up at my house at 7:30 AM on December 23rd.  They had two chipper trucks and two cherry pickers lined up down my street, and all of the men started buzzing around my yard preparing to take down the trees.  I was half expecting more guys to rappel down out of a helicopter saying "hut hut hut", but that never happened.

(Some of you may be mourning my trees and mentally calculating the extra CO2 that will be in the atmosphere as a result of this, but these two were so tangled up in my power lines that it was causing a problem. If a big wind were to one day blow one of the trees down, and that actually happens here, it would yank all the electricity lines and meters off the back of my house, and my neighbor's too.  It could even start a fire.  And I was unable to trim the tree myself because of it being tangled up in the power lines.  This tree needed pros.)

[At one point there were 13 men in our backyard.]

Almost all of the dialog between these men was in Spanish. I could only make out a little bit of it, but I'm pretty sure they kept calling the guy up in the tree "Pokemon" for reasons known only to tree pros.  To me it sounded like "Spanish Spanish Spanish tree Spanish Spanish him Spanish Pokemon".

I was so happy to have this tree removed I decided to make them some coffee. It was cold and early, and they drank about three pots between them.  One of them noticed the bumper sticker on my car that says "Yo <3 Los Frijoles, Honduras" and asked me about it. I got to tell him (in Spanish) that I travel down there with students every summer to work on projects and eat beans.  I'm not really sure he understood my Spanish, but we all went away happy and caffeinated.

[Before]

[After]