Dendrophile - that's not me.  

I mean, I like forests.  Trees, when they're altogether in one place by themselves, are cool.  But individually, they're  assholes.  Not fit to share living space with human beings.

Case in point: a couple years ago, a huge tree fell in the neighborhood and completely demolished my next-door-neighbor's house.  Would have killed them, too, if they were home (fortunately, they were at their summer lakehouse in the North Georgia mountains).  

Many tree have fallen in this woodsy neighborhood since them.  Some have damaged homes, others automobiles.  Most have knocked down power lines leaving us without electricity until a chainsaw gang can clear the timber and the power company can restring the wires. That takes anywhere from four hours to several days.

On Monday morning, December 23rd, 5:20 a.m., a major tree fell three houses over from mine.  It blocked the road and of course took down the power lines.  Cable and fiber-optic lines, too.  Power was restored after 10 hours, but cable and internet access weren't restored until 1:30 pm today, some 80 hours later.

My plan for the Christmas week was simple - watch some college bowl games, binge on some Netflix and maybe re-watch The Witcher series or the entire four seasons of Mr. Robot.  Download one or two of the games I bought on Steam's Thanksgiving sale to fill in the rest of the time.

But, no, the tree made sure I couldn't do that.  No cable and no internet means no Netflix and no Amazon Prime.  No cable means no ESPN or football games.  No internet means no access to the video games I have stored on Steam's cloud.  And as luck would have it, I had just cleaned my hard drive of the games I had completed, and Sunday night, the evening before the tree fell, I completed Far Cry: New Dawn.  The only games left on my hard drive were the leftover missions in New Dawn, Minecraft,  and Microsoft solitaire.

The tree couldn't have timed its fall better - falling the day before Christmas Eve assured that services wouldn't be restored until after the holidays.  

So, excuse me if I'm not a dendrophile.  I'm certainly not a dendrophobe, it's not like I'm afraid of them.  Call me "dendroaverse."