Do you grade on effort or performance?
This summer Carpenter ants felled a big tree in the river where we swim and launch our kayaks. Most of the tree has been under water until now. Now: Newmarket has opened up their dam for maintenance and the river has gone down substantially. We've never seen it so low. A good part of the tree isn't submerged any more--though there is a lot of tree top under the water.
Neil really wanted to go down and see if we could saw it up. Got down there and found that would require standing in 4 feet of freezing water. And even getting to the water required navigating a steep and oozy drop off (first challenge was pulling one of Neil's boots out of the mud). So he borrowed our neighbor's Come Along (we thought it would work--it pulled Neil's car out of a messy situation recently--another story ;) ). So I shimmied out and wrapped the rope around the tree and we tried. No luck. And the rope we had that was long enough wasn't real thick and we were worried about it snapping. Then we thought it would be good if we could cut the main branch to all the major branches under water. So I shimmied back out and sawed ---- for a long time . . . I think I must have been at least 3/4s of the way through -- and then the cut closed up on the saw and it wouldn't budge.
Neil said I made a great effort--that he really wanted us to at least try :) Unfortunately I've never graded on effort. I like performance!
Oh my goodness, first, that river is awesome, what a great place to live! But to have to climb out there in this kind of weather and attempt to saw that limb with your left hand, no thank you!!! Better luck in the spring!
Posted by: anke | November 07, 2009 at 08:12 PM
You go girl! I am impressed, even if it didn't go through! Sorry it didn't work :-)
Posted by: Michelle | November 08, 2009 at 07:06 PM