I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay...

In the big storm, we lost half of the tree in front of our house. After removing the fallen debris, it became obvious that the rest of the tree needed to come down. So on Saturday, my brother-in-law came over with his chain saw. I cut down a lot of the low branches with a bow saw before he came. When he arrived, we went on to the main event.

The most exciting part of the job was chopping off the top of the tree that was angled towards my neighbor's house. I climbed the ladder resting on the trunk of the tree with my bow saw. We tied a rope around the tree just above the height of the ladder and he took hold of it, pulling from the ground. I started sawing through the trunk below the cut. When it started cracking, I climbed down the ladder as fast as I could and hit the ground in time to see the tree top gracefully crack and fall harmlessly into the neighbor's yard. After that it was more or less just a matter of cleanup - using the chainsaw to cut the big branches into smaller chunks to get piled up by the curb and hauled away by the city.

After he took off, I spent some time drilling holes into the soft wood of the stump. I covered the remains of the stump with some fertilizer and watered the area. The thought is that in several months, the stump should rot away enough that I can get rid of it without having to grind it away.

Update:
We got the tree down just in time. The city came by this morning and finally started clearing our street of debris.