Carnage in Cook!

We interrupt our series of holiday reminisces to bring you details of the Carnage in Cook.

We had invited Susie, Patrick & kids over to dinner , and were just sitting down to eat when a somewhat ferocious storm struck. We were eating in the dining room at the time, looking out the back window at the storm pull branches of our back neighbours eucalypt. Sometime after we'd finished eating the kids returned to say that there was a lady at the door, who turned out to be our neighbour Lil. The conversation went as follows:
Lil: "Are you all OK?"
Me: "Yes, we're fine, thanks."
Lil: "Are there any trees down at the back."
Me: "Not that I've noticed, why do you ask?"
Lil: "You mean, you don't know about your tree out the front?"

That was when I peaked around the corner to see our huge eucaypt sprawled across the road. And when I say huge, I mean absolutely gigantic. The trunk is about 1.2m in diameter, and the tree stretched right across the road to within a few cm of the neighbours house. All the neighbours were out there already, and we spent a few minutes circumnavigating the tree to ensure that there wasn't too much damage. It missed the hedge at #7 by cms, blocked the driveway at #6 (he's away for the weekend) but partially smashed the garden at #4. All in all we considered ourselves pretty lucky (none more so than the chinese guy walking down the street who was about 20m away when it fell).

It provided somewhat of a focal point, initially for the street, but later on for most of the suburb as word got around. It seemed the SES/RFS/Fire Brigade were all telling people that the biggest tree to come down was ours, and everyone came for a gawk.

At about 8-ish the Fire Brigade came to chop it into bits so they could clear the road, but after an hour or 2 they realised it wasn't going to happen tonight. So they put tape across the road so nobody would drive into it and left us to our own devices.

To be honest, I was kind of proud of having such a large tree in our yard, and will definitely miss it. But there are always positives, such as:

• It didn't fall on our house, or our neighbours house;
• It didn't even fall on Susie's car;
• We don't have to pay to remove it, because it was in front of the water meter (At least it was when it was planted, but it was so massive that I think a fraction of it might have been behind the water meter by the time it died);
• We got to chat to all our neighbours;
• We might get some nice slices of timber to make some back garden seats (but I think the solid, 1m cubed timber coffee table I had promised Rob may be impractical); and
• While chatting to our back-fence neighbours (the ones with chickens), it transpired that they are about to go on a posting, and are looking to give away their chickens - clearly divine intervention, since Nat has been looking to buy chickens for months .....