Filling a Day of Social Distancing - 5/5/2020 – Dead Pine
/Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….
Here are the unique activities for yesterday:
Sending off a check to a relative graduating from high school. Some events continue to happen no matter what. The details of how they are celebrated might change. This one was far enough away a card/check was what I would have done even without the pandemic.
Seeing an ad for GE’s Wonder Kitchen in the June 1955 issue of Life Magazine – A 9.5 foot combo: washer/dryer, sink, dishwasher, stove with a stainless steel counter. Add a refrigerator and have a complete kitchen! It was a product for the new suburbs. Note that the developer Bill Levitt was reviewing the product…known as the father of modern American suburbia – also for his refusal to allow racial minorities to buy houses in his development (see Wikipedia article here). So – this one page reminds us of the relationship of two big themes of the 1950s.
Watching the Juilliard Students grid music video (Ravel’s Bolero). It’s 9.5 minutes of music and performances…students and faculty and alum…from wherever they are ‘at home.’
Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.
And now about the cutting down of a dead pine tree….
One of our neighbors had a pine tree that died over the course of last summer and fall. They got a crew out to cut it down a little over a week ago. I watched the action from my office window…through the branches of the sycamore. It was the big excitement of the day. The process involved cutting off the lower branches as far up as the ladder reached, one of the crew climbing up the trunk using the stubs of branches for footholds and cutting off branches as he worked upward then cutting off the top, taking a break (maybe to get a bigger chain saw), and then cutting the tree close to the ground.
I took pictures of the stump a few days later. It’s always sad when a tree is cut down….even when its already dead. In the forest dead snags are great habitat for woodpeckers! But this tree had high potential of causing damage to a house if it fell on its own. It was a good idea to get it taken down in a controlled way.
