Catastrophising

Maybe the spelling is wrong but here's the point.  Some people wring their hands when something bad happens, catastrophizing and driving themselves crazy  and people think, OK it's bad. It's a crisis.  What do I do?  What's the next step toward a solution?

My husband falls into the first category.  Yesterday after a particularly bad storm, a tree in our yard was uprooted and fell -smashed actually- into my daylily beds.  Just as the daylilies are starting to bloom! 

When trees are vertical, they don't look that big but when they fall they can be suddenly monstrous.  This tree was a monster, smashing even another tree.

I looked out the window at 6 :30 am and saw the damage.  Then I told my husband who became distraught.   He paced and catastrophized not just about the large tree uprooted and covering our yard but about everything bad that has ever happened to us, as if trees falling aren't an event that periodically just happens to everyone.  Frankly, I looked at us as lucky. The tree didn't fall on our house or car. It could have been much worse. Plus, maybe my daylilies would get more sun next year.  There's always tomorrow as the song goes.

I immediately made a list of the tree people who had done work for us in the past. My husband kept whining.   Called  three companies by 7 a.m. Got the voice mail for 2 companies and the sleepy voice of the wife of  one company owner.  She said "Mike" would be right over.  He came around 9 with three massive trucks and four men. By this time my husband was off to work, leaving this to me to handle..

The tree guys got to work and cut up the tree, shoved the wood into a grinder on the truck in an hour. The charge was reasonable and I even had a bonus. A big bonus.

I have been trying to get the guy who owns the cottage next to ours in Southern Maryland to cut branches off his massive and aging Tulip Poplar.  That would be a true disaster if a branch fell from about 60 feet up on our little cottage.  But the tree company needed his permission which he never bothered to give.  I had called repeatedly the neighbor. Always voice mail.  So I called  him again while the chain saws buzzed in the background.  Got his wife.  She said, put them on.  So I put Mike on and she gave permission to cut the branches on the Tulip Poplar.  I said I could meet him at the cottage that afternoon but he said he'd see he had to deal with the emergencies first. Now that Tulip Poplar is a true emergency in the making.....Forewarned is forearmed.