Big storm afternoon

A big thunderstorm came through this afternoon. The rain was being blown hard against our back windows, which usually doesn't happen, so we knew it was an unusually strong one.

I thought maybe I'd climb in the attic to see if we had any roof leaks, but once I got upstairs, Kyla was already in the yellow room and I could feel a significant cool breeze coming through.

"Uh, you feel that breeze?", I asked.

"Yeah, it feels good."

"Are all the windows closed?"

"Yeah, pretty sure..."

Nah, something's wrong. So I raced around checking windows, and as I started the descent into the basement, I could feel a strong breeze coming up from there...

"Oh, no." I muttered with my first glance into the big room in the basement. The back door was flung wide open, probably by the wind, and there was a half inch of water on the floor in a 5' radius around the back door. I raced over and shut it, but soon realized how much water had gotten in... The wind had been blowing so hard that the opposite wall 15 feet from the door was wet. We spent the next 45 minutes drying things and trying to vacuum the water out of the carpet with the wet/dry vacuum. Fun.

Then I went out front:

"Well, that'll be a little difficult to prop up..."

"Oh good, just a little branch came off of that tree..."

"Doh, make that half the tree! Uh, oh, and it's blocking half the road... "Wow, it didn't fall on my truck... And wow, that's the only part of either tree that didn't fall."

"That first tree sure fell flat!"

"That's a lot of water that came down..." Not wanting to risk the rest of the tree falling on my truck, I backed out, and went for a quick drive around the neighborhood to survey the damage. A lot of bradford pear trees fell, a couple people lost gutters, but pretty clean drops all around, as far as I could tell.

"What's Stuart doing with my tree?" Our neighbor from across the street had come while I was driving around, and was already cutting the branches with his son. What a guy!

Pretty soon our other neighbors showed up and we had a road-clearing party.

We still have a mess in the yard, the Tucks said they'd come help us with that Monday.

I went to see if anybody else needed help, and a fellow around the corner had his bradford pear tree drop on his new Cadillac and new Nissan Z300 (?). Amazingly, despite having probably 400 pounds of limbs laying over both cars, neither were really damaged -- just a slight ding on the side of the caddy's hood. I spent an hour or so helping them, then headed home.

Most of the people who saw the truck untouched by that tree said, "Wow, you got lucky."

But that's not how I think of it. =)