Bigger Than You Figure

So I'm settled at the parents' for the holidays, and yesterday Mom and I went out to cut down the tree. It proved to be a bit more of a job than planned. For starters, there's more snow than there was in Ottawa. It was about knee-high, and wet, heavy stuff. I couldn't find the good saw we usually use, so took the next-best one, and we trudged down the hill to find the tree we marked.

When we found the tree, we both looked at it, and decided that it really wasn't as good as we'd thought.  So we took our tags off it, and tramped around for a while trying to find a better one. The one we finally chose was tall enough that the cut site was a good 5 feet off the ground; a little awkward, but whatever.

At that point we found that the saw had lost a nut or something, and the blade was loose and unusable. So I stayed to mark the tree, and Mom tramped back up the hill to get another saw. The saw (not one we usually use) proved to be horrible for cutting live, damp, sticky wood. We took turns sawing, with the second person pulling on the tree to keep the sawed gap from closing and pinching the saw. By the time we were maybe 1/3 of the way through, both our arms were tired, and I said, 'Why didn't you just find something to fix the blade of the other saw so we could use it?' At which, Mom decided that was a good notion, and went back up to see about fixing the second saw. While hunting for a nut, she happened on the good saw, so brought that back. Two minutes later, the tree was down. In fact, it was so fast, that I had to suddenly back up out of the way, tripped on a shrub hidden under the snow, and ended up lying in the snow, laughing at how hard it was to get up.

It must have to do with the height it was above the ground initially, but seeing the tree on the ground, it looked a lot bigger than we expected. (This is a regular issue. We always worry it'll be too small, and wind up with a tree we need to trim before it'll fit in the room.) We hauled it back through the brush and up the hill to the house, and squeezed it through the door and into the shed to start defrosting, and found it was too tall to stand upright in the corner, so it's leaning against the attic stairs.

This afternoon we will have to take off whatever's necessary, before we haul it into the house. We did leave a big space in the living room:

But I don't think the space is as big as the tree.