Autumn in New England

This whole weekend was one of those lovely fall weekends...
where if you sit inside and lament the 50 degree temperatures you'll be convinced it is miserable and freezing, but if you get out and do some vigorous activity it will be a gorgeous fall day. Happily, we took the latter route.
Mom came over around lunchtime and we decided to trim the apple trees. We have two in our front yard that gave dramatically different crops this year (one gave two stunted apples, the other gave about 50 variously stunted and squirrel eaten apples.) I looked up online how to go about it a couple of days ago (trim off anything that grows straight up, and encourage those that curve out and up away from the trunk,) but I've never trimmed a fruit tree before, so I was glad to have Mom's more experienced, discerning eye.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to take a before picture, or an after picture for that matter, but my brilliant husband got excited enough to go in and grab the camera when Mom managed to convince me to start climbing. Or maybe it was more my conscience that convinced me.

We only had an 8 foot ladder, and these trees had been growing unchecked for some time, so there were some large branches that needed to go above the 8 foot line.
I should say, because this story will be more remarkable if I do, that I am terrified if heights. Terrified, like in high school when we were required to pretend we were gymnasts (for phys. ed.) and we were asked to do a "routine" on the balance beam, my legs would turn to jello and I would try desperately to find some way, ANY way to beg off.

Haris (the aforementioned husband) first said, "I could probably reach them if I climbed up."
And then Mom said, "I love climbing apple trees, these are good ones to climb, too!"
And a few things flew through my mind:
- Haris is quite a bit heavier than either Mom or I am, and these trees are not very thick.
- Mom is quite quickly reaching that technical "senior" age, where falling from an apple tree would be a rather bad thing.
- Both of them have full time jobs that they need to go to in order to pay our respective mortgages.

Which lead me to say, "I can go up." And surprisingly, I did! Up the 8 foot ladder, into the tree, and up a few more feet of branches. Mom handed up the saw, and down came the branches!

We didn't end up taking off as many as we originally intended to because a) when I got up there I realized they were MUCH bigger than they seemed from the ground, and b) we'd already taken off about a third of the tree, which is really all you should take at a time. Oh well, more fun for next year....



On another note, here is where our cat Toby now spends the vast majority of his time:

That would be the heating vent right behind him. Does anyone know if heat eventually flows THROUGH fur? Or is all that expensive oil fueled energy ending right in my friendly fur ball? Hmm...