Goodbye to the Sissoo

When we first made an offer on this house, we were made aware that the tree in the northwest corner of the lot was a potential problem.  Our neighbor was worried about it compromising his wall, and the sucker roots into his yard sending up shoots, for starters.  Others told us that the aggressive roots would cause a problem with the swimming pool.  My Oldtimer and I both opted to try to make it work.  It didn't.  It has been growing very rapidly, with the roots heaving up the ground at an amazing rate.  Since it's our only tree, we didn't mind the mess too much, but it does go through cycles of continuously dropping stuff - spent blossoms, fall leaves, and seed pods.   Still, it housed lots of birds - I called it my bird tenement house.  But no more...

Here's the before shot:

Here's an early during:

And a later during:

Here's a picture of my Oldtimer, saying "don't take pictures of me when I'm grunting":

And here's how it looked when we finished all the branches (today we have the world's largest slingshot in our yard, plus the biggest pile of brush I've ever seen):

The brush you see below the slingshot is about one-fifth of the stack.  Before we finished up for the day, all the brush was stacked in a different part of the yard, the pool was skimmed, the patio blown clean, and tools put away.  Guess who did it?  (Hint - not me.)