It's Tree-a-cane Season

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It's been a bad week for wind. Yesterday it was blowing so hard up on Diamond Heights that Plotnik couldn't open his car door until it let up. Living in gentle Shmalifornia you forget all those lessons about the power of nature.

JJ-aka-PP would like to forget about nature, but nature keeps reminding her. It has been terribly windy in Atlanta, so much so that two weeks ago a huge, healthy-looking oak in her neighbor's front yard toppled over with no warning, somehow missing JJ's house and all the cars in the street that it fell across, fortunately only taking out power lines and sidewalk. After years of drought there are many trees in the city that look fine on the outside but are in fact brittle or dead inside.

This same neighbor has another large tree in her backyard. You guessed it. Monday night a huge limb fell off that tree and smashed the roof of JJ-aka-PP's beautiful garage/workshop/guest house, that JJ calls The Hermitage, where the piano is, where Plot and Duck love to hang out when they're in Atlanta. Only a few hours earlier, JJ's boyfriend Paco's house, thirty miles away, had another tree limb smash in the roof of his house and wreck his truck. (Yes, we realize Paco drives the Paco Truck.) Paco is also JJ's contractor, and now he's got to fix his own house before he can fix the Hermitage.

This made Plotnik take another look at his idea to have the World Headquarters Construction Corps (no final 'e') build a small studio in the rear acreage, where the avocado plantation is now (one tree pictured above). The problem is the gynormous cedar tree in his neighbor's backyard that overhangs the avocado tree. That tree is nearly two backyards wide and at least seventy five feet tall. One of these days --- well, if a limb fell off the cedar it would simply smash the avocado tree now, but if the avocado tree weren't there and a nice little cottage was, with Isabella maybe sleeping happily inside?

Plot thinks this project is not going to happen.