Tree Houses

Last night I ran across an article on tree houses in the Costco circular: "Life out on a limb: treehouses for the upwardly mobile". I also have a tree house calendar for this year so it seems that this is the year of the tree house. I've always been fascinated by tree houses: the McPhersons out in Bardsdale had one and we'd play in it when Penny and I would play with Susan and Anne ____ when we were kids. What was their name? It will come to me. My grandfather Bill cut down two flowering peach trees trying to make me one and finally put it up in another larger flowering peach tree. It had a trap door and I backed off the side of the platform once (no walls) and fell about six feet. I was scared more than hurt.

The Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland was interesting but you could tell it wasn't a real tree so I was always slightly disappointed. I think I saw the movie but never read the book, since by the time it was popular, I felt I was too old to read it.

One of my professors at Santa Cruz in the 60s supposedly built a tree house and was living in it with the wife of another professor but there were a lot of flakey and unstable people around at the time. I remember him saying that we students were all losers because the really successful and ambitious high school students were jocks - football players. And I suppose cheerleaders because our high school didn't have any sports for girls. Thank goodness for title IX. That statement was not popular with the students who were overwhelmingly the independent loners. He, of course, may have been right, perhaps speaking from his own experience as a loser.

The article in the Costco circular mentioned these tree house resources, which I will note here so that I don't lose them, since I will toss the circular. I didn't know where else to store them. ;-) And, WOW, are the tree houses at the sites below fabulous, but you can tell they weren't made by kids, shouldn't they be?

TreeHouse Workshop:
http://www.treehouseworkshop.com/
Forever Young Treehouse:
http://www.treehouses.org/
Out 'n' About:
http://www.treehouses.com/
Treehouse Engineering:
http://www.treehouseengineering.com/

It looks like all the domains for treehouses are pretty well taken...