Jack

jack
verb, phrasal. As "jack someone around": to cause someone inconvenience or problems. As "jack in or into": to log into or connect up. As "jack something up": to raise something, especially a vehicle, with a jack.
verb, transitive. To take something illicitly, to steal.
Also a noun.

Marie saved her work when she heard the back door open. Larry entered with a heavy sigh and made his way to the armchair by her desk, where he flopped.

She studied his face before she spoke. His forehead was showing a little sunburn; his eyes were puffy; streaks of dirt decorated his cheeks. "How's it going?" she ventured.

"Nowhere." Marie waited, then he continued: "Why do I let you talk me into these things?"

"Talk you into what? You were planning to cut down a tree today regardless."

"Not where you talked me into cutting it," he cried. "Now I've got a forty-foot tree hung up on another tree, and the chainsaw blade is stuck in its trunk. My saw is trapped inside a tree, and it's going to rain."

And it's your fault, Marie mentally finished for him. Thirty years of marriage had taught her not to take the complaint personally. She knew that it was just his frustration talking. The rain wasn't predicted to start for nearly two days. Larry had encountered this situation before when logging and had always managed to solve the problem. Felling trees that stood near other trees was a puzzle that he relished solving, after the initial tirade.

Marie rolled her chair back and reached for his hand. "Let's go look at it," she suggested. After another sigh and a look from him that was half-glare, half-resigned, he rose and followed her outside.

The tree lay diagonally across a small clearing, its top branches resting on a few limbs in two neighboring trees. Larry slowly approached its base, examining the branches above. She followed, but kept her distance. Careful not to step where the leaning trunk could kick back and hit him, Larry studied angles and calculated forces. Marie looked at the tools already in the clearing: a chain, a pry bar, the temporarily-useless chain saw pinched in the tree.... He had already tried several ideas.

"Maybe," Larry mused, sighting up the trunk, "if I jack it up from there," he gestured at a point just above the saw bar, then reached up and forward, aligning his arm with the truck. He rotated his arm from the shoulder, in anticipation of how it would fall after that. "Yeah," he said, "that might do it."

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.