Urban Forestry Time

Today's Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and we're cutting down trees. YEAH.

After contemplating cutting down these half-dead birch trees for most of the last year (but lamenting the logistics/time/money involved), my neighbor completely surprises me and hires someone to come do it out of the blue. Since the tree was mostly dead (no branches/leaves), and no clearance issues (no powerlines) it was a relatively easy job, and it only took them a few minutes to climb up there, cable it, cut a few deft notches, and pull it down. Since the price was right, we had them go ahead and do the other one too. So even though I was tired, grumpy, and still nursing the cold, I had fun standing there watching the crew working (and it reminded me so much of the Foresters I used to work with at AJC...sure miss those guys.) So it's time for a shameless plug for Alder Creek--As a person who spent a couple of years observing Urban Forestry training in action, those guys did a beautiful job, did a textbook perfect job, and the price was nice.

On a more relevant MLK note, I finally finished reading this fantastic book Marching to the Mountain Top that I checked out from the library (in the Children's Section) about the Memphis Sanitation Strike. It was rather comprehensive, had great information, was engagingly written, and works for a pretty wide swath of ages (upper elementary though high school, really). I highly recommend it.