sap

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday, in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. He encourages us to participate in this cellphone photo prompt by creating our own CellPic Sunday post and linking it back to his post.

The photo below shows a big pine tree — a Deodar cedar to be precise — in our front yard. It’s old and it’s leaning toward our home and it has already dropped some large, dead branches that have fallen off during some heavy winds and came perilously close to falling on our house. Additionally, our front yard is full of pine needles and sap, making it unwelcoming for our dog. So my wife and I decided to take down the old pine tree and eventually replace it with, perhaps, a maple.

The day came for the tree to be removed and I put a chair in our backyard and periodically snapped photos of the progress of the tree removal. This first shot was take. At 10:00 am, just before the crew got to work on the tree.

This second shot was taken about an hour and a half later as they were cutting off the lower branches.

These guys worked fast and by 1:30 in the afternoon all of the branches were removed and the top of the trunk was already down.

And by 2:45, the tree was fully removed except for the stump, and it took almost as long to grind down the stump as it did to take down the whole tall tree.

Now my wife and I need to go shopping g for a nice, healthy maple tree to replace that big old pine tree in our front yard.

As usual, the photos used in this post have been resized (shrunk) to make them load more quickly and take up less space in my WordPress media folder.

“I bought us a couples pass for the spa resort at that mountaintop hotel that Anna and Dave went to last month. It’s for this weekend and it will be so romantic,” Debra said.

“A spa?” Theo said. “No way I’m going to soak in some hot tub in the mountains when there are snakes around. That would be a huge faux pas as far as I’m concerned.”

“Theo, what in the world are you talking about?” Debra asked. “Dammit, I told you not to watch that stupid Snakes on a Plane movie, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t watch that,” Theo said, “but I saw a documentary on Cleopatra and how she killed herself with an asp, which is like a cobra, that she held to her breast when she was in her tub.”

“Don’t be a sap, Theo. That’s just a myth,” Debra said. “Here, let me Google it and you’ll see that it’s a legend.” Debra took out her iPhone and Googled, “Was Ceopatra killed by an asp?” Then she handed her iPhone to Theo. “Read this,” she insisted.

According to the most widely repeated theory of Cleopatra’s death, she died from a venomous snake bite, inflicted either by an asp or an Egyptian cobra. But there are several problems with this theory, according to modern Egyptologists. For one thing, cobras were typically at least five feet long, and could grow up to eight feet; much too large to smuggle into Cleopatra’s mausoleum in a basket of figs, as the story goes. In addition, not all snake bites are deadly, and those that are kill their victims slowly and painfully, making it hard to believe a snake was able to kill Cleopatra and her two maids in the short time it took for Octavian to receive her note and send his guards. Most Egyptologists believe she committed suicide by drinking poison.

“So she wasn’t bitten by an asp in a hot tub?” Theo asked.

“No, she apparently wasn’t,” Debra said, “although that legend sure sounds sexy, doesn’t it?”

“Well, I think that show I watched should have a public service announcement before they broadcast it saying that it’s just a legend.”

“Good idea, Theo,” Debra said. “Why don’t you start drafting up a PSA to that effect and I’ll call and confirm our reservations.”

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where the words are sap, spa, asp, pas, and PSA.