Creating Lifelike Characters

I know that it seems like I spend way too much time at the swimming pool. It's just been such an incredibly hot summer (even for the Deep South), that whenever my children utter the fateful words, "We're bored!" then I just pop them in the car and take them off to the pool.

I was at the pool last week and something started bothering me about the tree in the picture. See the tree I'm talking about? It's huge. It's like a pine tree on steroids.

The other thing that bothered me about t...