Crash!

So Russell the dog and I are just chillin this morning, me with my Earl Grey tea and a new quilting mag, when there is a loud, crunchy, rustling kind of crash.  Having no directional hearing, I rely on Russell to tell me where it is coming from.  He runs to the screen door to the backyard and I follow.  He zooms over to the side fence and then glances down the side of the yard, starts to run over but then hesitates.  I think, oh no, is there some animal in the yard?  So I go look--it's not animal, it is vegetable.  And then I go get my camera.

The crunchy crash was this thing, from the palm tree in our neighbor's yard.

My hand for scale--really big fruit/seed pods.

You may be able to make out two more of these hanging seed structures in the Queen palms.  While I was snapping pictures of the palms, I heard another crunchy crash and realized the neighbor was using a pole saw to cut them off.  He came over to say he thought it would fall on his side.  No matter, nothing was hurt.

But dang those things are heavy!  The whole thing probably weighed more than 50 lbs by my estimate from trying to pull it a bit. It knocked over the old BBQ into some other junk  (Note Russell behind the BBQ poking his nose into the fence gap).

I tried to do a soft focus thingie so you could see the spike that it was cut from.  These Queen palms are about 20 feet high at the point where the spike juts off, and the fronds about 10-12 feet above that.  No wonder it crashed!  Well, my tea is gone and I've got sewing to do and a desk to make.  See ya!