I got carried away at the wife's carriage house yeserday, trimming trees that keep the courtyard dark, wet and mossy. Bad enough it's been raining every day for six weeks, but the overgrown area is getting gross, full of bugs.

So I started hacking tree limbs off to let some more light shine. The courtyard is narrow, with a two story brick house on one side and a brick wall on the other — partically blocked by an old storage building.

Armed with a bow saw, a flimsy six-foot aluminum ladder and sneakers, I ascended and started taking branches down. I kept thinking one of them was going to kick back and deliver the el-cabong. It's times like that you start thinking health insurance is a good idea.

The branches I was taking down were trees unto themselves — four to eight inches thick and as much as twenty-plus feet high. They were coming down like pile drivers.

After cutting one of them a third of the way through, I stopped to condsider what manner of madness I was pursuing. I was sweaty and manic.

The branch had started to heel, but was being held up by others in the canopy. It was threatening to either go into the building or smash the pergola over the deck. Hmm.

I was cutting above the branch and down toward the ground. If I kept going, it would have gone down like a redwood with an Earth Liberation Front commando in it.

So I started cutting on the underside of the branch, working toward the top cut like the horizontal line of the capital letter 'L.'

Once I got a third of the way through there, I did a little more on the top, and then switched back. The branch started creaking — I bet it weighed over 200 pounds. Wow, I thought, this could really do a lot of damage.

But I got lucky. With my sneaker-clad foot wedged in between a wishbone of the tree, I kept cutting on the under side of the branch until it finally gave. It plummeted straight down, vertically, into the brick walk, driving one of the bricks into the ground about three inches. Took me an hour to cut it up into smaller pieces.

I won't be doing any more tree work for a while.