This is what happens when you take a suburban loafer, put him in the City for 20 some years, and then send him back to the 'burbs, now with property responsibilities. First, you get to work really hard at stuff you have no skill at (no matter how good your Excel abilities, they don't help at all to paint a house, or clear a garden, or do tree surgery). Regarding the last, I'm here to give an important piece of advice: don't put an extension ladder on a deck without strong, heavy support behind it. Even if you've anchored the top part of the ladder with both sides on a main part of the tree, when you start sawing and moving, if there's no strong bottom support things tend to happen pretty quickly. In my case, I was working near the property fence, sawing pretty reachable dead kumquat branches off the tree. First 4 went fine. Then it gets a little fuzzy. I do remember falling about 20 feet between the deck and fence and hitting something on the way down. Awake after a few seconds and tingling all over, I make this mewing cry "helllp" a couple times, then kind of get myself together and get up. I call family on the cell, eventually go to an urgent care center, get really good, positive x-rays, and am now back for good or ill, inflicting more opinion on you all.

The scary thing is that if I'd hit my head on the way down about an inch lower and an inch to the right, (I can show you where I did hit because I have a half-baseball size knob on the back of my head) I wouldn't be writing this as I would be dead or totally paralyzed. I have been thanking God I am alive ever since. Even a card with a series of 4 horse races looks luminous and appealing. Alive in the double in the 2nd, and just plain alive!

About 7 years ago, my father-in-law was on a ladder with a chainsaw, cutting away from broken branches left from a past ice storm. A strong wind blew, and he went flying, landing on his leg in the wrong direction. Needless to say, he had a nasty compound fracture that could have been deadly if he didn't toss away the chainsaw.

These days, he's banished from using extension ladders.

At the urgent care, one of the desk ladies told me about a relative who'd been doing the same thing as your father-in-law with an electric chainsaw, with the worst possible result. Someone found him in the alley, dead, with the chainsaw still running.
Oldguy saves my bacon in the second and it's a beautiful day.

It cost me 550.00 bucks to clear some tree limbs. The best money I ever spent. With beer in hand, I supervised 5 men. Couldn't even tell they were in the yard when they left. I don't ride horses anymore either