Timber!!!

What a great word: a manly word. When said the right way n as a yell and holding on the "berrrr" part - it lets people know that a tree is coming down. It makes you feel like you're accomplishing something.

Last Saturday, I did my best to refrain from saying it when a tree in my backyard came crashing down because I wasn't the one that was doing the accomplishing. No sense taking credit where it wasn't due.

A little background: This tree has been dead since about the time we moved in. The bark would come off like you're peeling a banana. I grabbed a branch one time and it snapped off like a twig.

With winter coming and remembering the storm devastation from last winter, the tree needed to come down.

However, my skills - or more accurately, lack of skills - necessitated some help. Thankfully my father-in-law knows what he's doing.

(Don't worry City of Albany officials, the tree met your guidelines for being cut down).

I'm not going to tell people how to fall a tree because I'm no expert and it's dangerous. According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the logging industry has a fatality rate of 85.8 deaths per 100,000 workers. The rate is more than 21 times higher than the fatality rate for all workers in the United States in 2005.

Those are the people who know what they are doing.

Here's just what we did and some simple advice:

Wear the right clothes: I knew this wasn't a job for shorts, but I forgot about my arms and wore a short sleeve shirt. My right arm now looks like I lost a fight to an angry cat.

Other protection: At the very least wear goggles and ear plugs. You don't want sawdust in your eyes and you don't know what could happen with a branch snapping back, even after the tree is down. As for ear plugs, all I can say is chainsaws are 90-plus decibels loud. I pulled a plug out of one ear last Saturday and couldn't believe the sound level.

According to About.com, American OSHA regulations require that employed chainsaw operators also wear head protection, chainsaw protective footwear and chainsaw protective chaps or pants. That part is up to you, but it is OSHA's job to keep people safe; they know what they are talking about.

Start at a decent hour: Just because you are allowed start at 7 on a Saturday morning doesn't mean you should. If you like your neighbors and don't want to alienate them, start later on. We first fired up the

chainsaw about 9:30 a.m.

My father-in-law was the leader of our exercise. I was just there as the helper - in other words, don't get in the way.

We found our best option for dropping the tree was into the field behind the house. He started taking off a section of fence board-by-board to give the tree a place to land, but after about three boards I told him the whole section would come off. Unlike many other fences, mine doesn't have brackets holding the sections to the posts. We just pulled out the nails and lifted out the 8-foot section.

He took off low-hanging branches so they wouldn't scrap the shed located near the tree.

At that point, his chainsaw didn't want to run. I think it took longer to fix the saw than it did to actually fall the tree and cut up the wood. It's weird that in every project, something always seems to go wrong.

Once he made the top and bottom cuts so the tree would fall the right way, I pushed on the back of the tree while he made the back cut. The tree hit the exact spot we wanted it to go. Hooray, no explaining to my wife why the tree is now on the shed.

Once the tree was on the ground, it was my time to be productive. I used my dad's smaller chainsaw (I really need to buy one) and we cut the branches off the tree. The branches (three pickup loads in all) went to my father-in-law's house for the burn pile.

The wood we kept, either to burn while camping or in case we decide to fire up the fireplace in the house this winter.

All in all, the project went fine. In two hours on a Saturday morning, the tree was down and cut up and I was back inside doing another manly thing - watching college football ... and folding laundry.