Or, how the goons of Rocket City (the Huntsville Utilities tree trimming crew) ruined my wife’s day and thus mine.

It has been a long year.

First, my wife’s mother fell ill back last March/April and died in November.

Then, immediately following, my father’s health declined rapidly.

Sure, it’s the cycle of life and all that, but it’s also emotionally/physically draining.

Then, to make matters worse, a crape myrtle I have protected year after year from the butchery of power line tree trimmers was nearly slaughtered by the uncaring, untrained hands of those less-educated brutes who attacked my wife’s favourite blooming bush at the end of the driveway this morning.

From a 20-foot tall beauty to a 3-foot stump in a matter of minutes.

All while my mother, sister, niece and I fret over the care my father receives with the caring, trained hands of the medical staff at the local VA hospital.

In addition, an heirloom Rose of Sharon was damaged, along with two smaller crape myrtle bushes.

This, my friends, in the town that helped put men on the Moon!

So, let us serve as a warning to those wanting to move to Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

Yes, it is in the state where George Wallace stood on the steps of the University of Alabama, barring African-Americans from crossing the threshold of higher education.

Butchers still live in this area of the world.

They hide behind chainsaws and cherry pickers, taking out the frustrations of their home lives on the helpless hybrid plants growing beneath the hazardous, humming harbingers of electrical shocks and high monthly utility bills.

They exist to make your life miserable.

They succeeded today.

Where’s a city forester to provide an educated point of view about how to carefully trim trees and bushes for the health of citizens?

Today, I am very unhappy…modern civilisation has let me down.

But then again, based on recent reports of 8th graders, science is not their best subject, which leads directly (through misunderstanding a tree’s anatomy and human psychology) to why government tree trimmers have a lack of understanding the need to aesthetically please the people who pay their salaries.

Maybe I ought to lobby to fire a few tree trimmers or heavily reduce their income to balance the local government budget?

Or at least educate today’s kids to become better qualified tree trimmers in the future.

Even after writing this blog entry, I still don’t feel better.

There’s a stump in the yard where a majestic myrtle once stood and there’s not a single thing I do about it from here, except shoot pictures and ask questions later about Huntsville Utilities departmental budgets and personnel files (nothing like an inside job to build a paper trail and get revenge the cold, hard way — expense report abuse and timecard fraud are common offenses, for starters — local government officials failing the newspaper test right before fall elections).

We may be on the verge of populating space habitats, making a lot of us very busy, but there’s still time to play games with people’s lives who cross my path and upset my wife in the process…