No good deed ...

goes unpunished. Or so everyone keeps telling me, and Sunday it seemed very true.

We started out at 8:00 am to cut down a tree and put up a fence. Mind you, we didn't want to cut down the tree ... we were perfectly happy with it where it was, and the trunk was mostly on our side of the property line. But, just a few days before, our neighbor had informed us that the tree was causing him 'lots of problems' because the limbs keep growing into his power lines. I started to give him permission to cut it down if he wanted to, but my husband was quicker than I .. he knew right away that this was the old man's roundabout way of asking US to cut the tree down. We sort of understood why he was bringing it up now .. once we got our fence put up it would be almost impossible to cut that tree down without hitting either his house or our fence. So .. trying to be the good neighbor, hubby agreed to cut the tree down.

8:00 am - Hubby starts trying to get a rope over one of the larger limbs to prevent the tree from falling the 'wrong' way.
8:20 am - Hubby starts on tree with chainsaw.
9:25 am - Hubby finally gets wedge cut out of tree and takes a break.
9:40 am - Tiiiimmmbbeerr!
10:45 am - We discover that, even after cutting most of the large limbs and dragging them out of the way by hand, the tree is too large and heavy to be moved with our 1/2 ton 4WD Chevy Silverado.
11:55am - After cutting up more of the tree into smaller chunks and dragging them off with the truck, we run out of room and decide to change directions. As I'm driving the truck across the field, I lose steering. The left front tie rod end is broken.
12:35pm - After finally getting the truck maneuvered out into the driveway where Hubby can work on it, we break for lunch.
1:15 pm - Hubby collects tools and parts and goes to work on the truck. I start weeding and mulching in the garden.
3:20 pm - The truck is repaired and tested. We return to the fallen tree.
4:05 pm - The last - and largest - section of trunk gets tangled up in the unrolled fence lying on the ground and, before I can see what's happening and stop, over 60 feet of field fence is trashed and three concreted-in corner posts have been ripped up out of the ground.
4:10 pm - Totally disgusted, Hubby gets in the truck saying "That's it, I'm done! (and some other things I won't repeat here) and goes to the house.
4:40 pm - Now cooled off and calmed down, Hubby returns to the scene where I am struggling (without much success) to put the corner posts back up. He explains that we can't reset the corner posts with the fence still attached, and, since the fence staples are nearly impossible to get out, we'll have to cut the fence. More $150/roll field fence gets trashed.
5:50 pm - Posts are back in the ground as good as they're going to get until we can dig bigger holes and fill in with more concrete. Fence is cut, spliced, and stretched to the 'weak' corner.
6:25 pm - Fence is spliced and stretched to the next corner, as well as it can be considering, and t-posts are going up.
7:05 pm - T-posts are up, Hubby starts stretching fence to next corner while I clip fence to t-posts as fast as I can, 2 per post for now.
8:35 pm - Fence is more or less up and clipped to t-posts and we are 'jerry-rigging' an extra piece of fence to serve as a makeshift gate because Atwoods closed at 6pm.
9:05 pm - We finish removing the damaged fence sections from the area and get our tools and supplies put away. Hubby starts fixing dinner and I start on my evening chores.

No good deed goes unpunished. And, as Hubby said, that may well be the last 'neighborly' thing we ever do for those neighbors. The old man has a tractor and spent at least part of the day sitting on his porch watching us because I saw him. Most of the hell we went through could have been avoided if he'd helped us, even a little bit, with the tree that he wanted cut down.

My animals really annoy me some days, but at least they are just animals and nearly always do it by accident or just because it's their nature. I can assume that people do it on purpose - or that they're really that stupid. Which is kinder, do you think?