Happy Mothers Day.....and Kaboom

So I hope any mothers that read this blog had a lovely day, of course that non-stop rain was not helping the lovely part. We had my parents and my brother over for lunch, I can now do this with very close family members and friends since I have a functional kitchen but know they won't judge Adam and I for the way we live in or remodeling mess :) We had a nice time and after they left Adam and I took some wonderful rainy Sunday afternoon naps.



My parents left around 5:00 and when Adam went in the kitchen a bit before 8:30 to get an after-the-nap-snack he exclaimed "What the heck!" At that little exclamation I of course needed to see what was going on in the kitchen. I thought perhaps our beloved little puppy had left some kind of bodily function gift for us, but nope that wasn't it at all, she was still in her crate taking her Sunday afternoon/night/all day nap too and hadn't awoken yet. He was standing at the back patio door and when I finally got there to look out it brought back some bad memories of a the lovely January storm. The big tree in our backyard had another large portion, probably at least 15 to 20 feet in length, had fallen over. Luckily missing our house once again but this time much closer. I don't know how we didn't hear something when it came down, guess we are hard sleepers. It is still attached, but barely and all the leafy area is now laying on our newly planted and growing grass. Adam turned in disgust as he knew this meant more time outside and more delay on getting things finished inside. He also knew this meant nicely begging one of our neighbors to borrow their chains saw again. Since we are leaving for Vacation on Friday he also knew that Monday and Tuesday were going to be his only chance to get this off our newly planted grass and at least dragged to the back of the yard.



One thing was decided for sure, this tree is now so fugly that it will have to come down at some point in the future. I didn't tell Adam this but I'm kind of glad that he made this decision because I thought it looked ridiculous after the storm when it really was only half a tree and I have ever really liked having that big of tree that close to our house, especially give our luck!

Above is picture from the last storm and the tree on the right is the one that was affected. You can't tell how full of a tree it was in this picture but even with half of it gone it was still pretty big and full. Below is a picture we we first planted the grass in the big dirt circle around the tree, it had just really started to look plush this last week. Hopefully Adam can get the tree out of the way before it ruins a section.

The Perfect Storm.......but darn messy

I don't know if it was really the perfect storm, we would have preferred to not have one at all, but for the destruction it caused we were so lucky with the small amount of damage that it caused our house and vehicle. Also I think we are going to save all the brush and rent a brush chipper to make our own mulch. This should save us some $$$$ in the spring when we need to mulch a ton of stuff.

This picture is of the portion of the tree that fell on my car. At this point Adam had moved my car out of the way, but you can also see how close it got to the house. Also it is harder to tell in this picture but there is obviously some trees that fell on our garage. These types of trees in this tree line were the only ones that actually made contact with the house.

The large tree branch to the right in this picture is the one that missed the corner of our house by about a foot or so.
The 2/3rds of a tree you see laying on the ground is the tree that could have done some major damage had it fallen towards the house. Its hard to tell by this picture but it was a large part of a large tree. In the background of the second picture you can see that we only really have 2 of the pine trees remaining of the like 6 that we had between our house and the neigbors.
To the right of this picture is the 1/3rd of the maple tree that is left, we are hoping if we do some trimming we are able to save the tree because it was a very pretty tree, especially in the fall. You can also see a closer view of the trees on the house on the left side of the picture. The tree that is actually lying on the ground is the one that took down our power, cable, and phone lines. All but the cable has been fixed.
The picture below must have been one that Adam took while walking around the neighborhood but it is an example of how strong these winds where, they just knocked down these mature trees like they were nothing. There were several on 44th street that were down like this and the root system and trunk size that got pulled out of the ground was probably the size of a small car.

This is another picture Adam took while walking around, this tree was lying across the street at the end our our block and was one of may of the reasons we didn't get power back for over 24 hours.

Straight Line Winds.... meet The Humpty Dumpty House

Wow what a 36 hours it has been! The Humpty Dumpty House narrowly escaped some major damage from the storm on Tuesday evening. The events kind of went as so:

Tuesday evening ~1/29/08

• 6:45 ish - Adam returns home from work after staying there to study for a test he has on Friday
• 7:00 ish - it starts to get a bit windy and I comment that I think we need to get the TV on b/c there is a chance of severe storms so I want to know what is going on. My dear husbands reminds me that I may, in fact, worry too much and that it is just some rain and wind. (mind you, the tornado sirens have now been going off for several minutes)
• 7:05 ish - Our lights go off, our entire house shakes and a very loud "not just a little bit of wind and rain" sound can be heard. I run towards the bathroom/hallway area and yell "This is not NORMAL and where are you!!" Adam had gone on a hunt for our flashlight, Lord only knew where it might have been. He was using the light from his cell phone to try and find it. After the 5 seconds of madness stopped we were now also looking for our poor little dog, Abbi. Adam eventually found her sitting back by the patio door, shaking in fear so bad he could hardly pick her up, poor little thing. At that point I had located our small radio, that I had luckly put batteries in, so I found some weather coverage to find out if we were in the clear. Adam called me to the back patio door where he found Abbi and said "you have to see this". Our large tree that is only about 20 feet from our backdoor was 2/3rds of the way gone and lying in our yard. I immediately said "Praise God!" because had the tree fallen towards our house it would have done some major damage.
• 7:10 ish - Adam took the flashlight and went outside to see what else might have fallen. We found out he had 3 large fur trees uprooted and laying against our house and roof over the garage area. Another portion of a tree had fallen in our drive way and hit the front of my car. In the back yard we knew about the one tree but another has almost down and was literlly laying a foot away from the corner of our house, but didn't hit it. One of the trees on the side where the garage is had fallen on the powerline that goes to our meter.
• 7:15ish - Firetrucks are going up and down our street and firemen are coming 2 by 2 to each house to make sure that everyone is ok and to tell us it might be some time before we have electricity, so with it being so cold, we need to make sure to stay warm.
• 7:30 ish - We start calling our parents to let them know what is going on, and I talk to my Dad since he is my insurance agent about what to do with my car and if there is any damage on the house.
• 8:00ish - We are talking to our friends Steve and Michelle and Michelle offers to let us (including Abbi) stay at her condo in Avon since we have no heat and it is supposed to get down to below zero, so I start trying to get stuff together for that. Our next door neighbor comes over and tells us he has a big fire started in his fireplace if we need to warm-up and also has a chainsaw and other stuff if we needed to borrow it. Adam did go ahead and borrow the chainsaw, the amazing thing was that our neighbors property had virtually no damage.

By around 10:00 we are heading over to Michelle's condo packed up with our toothbrushes and some pajamas. Abbi made the trip too since we didn't think leaving her in a house w/o heat with subzero weather would be very nice.

Wednesday ~ 1/30/08

After fueling up for what we knew would be a long day with some Cracker Barrell breaksfast, Adam and I headed back to the house a little tenative about what it might look like in daylight. We intially took a drive down our street and noticed that basically every house south of ours on the street had a tree down, but no ones house seemed to sustain major damage.

We spent most of yesterday with Adam using the chainsaw to cut up the trees and get any that were on the house off of it, while I was dragging stray limbs and such into piles. All while fending off all the tree removal companies and contractors that were a steady stream of visitors for a couple of hours in the afternoon. We will probably use one of the tree companies to actually get the stuff we can't use for firewood off of our property, but the actual cutting we could do ourselves without paying $$$$$$. We got quite a bit done and I even got my car over to Church Brothers for an estimate and I'm taking it in next Monday to get fixed.

We finally got power restored at 10:30 pm last night and in the meantime used our fireplace, for the first time since moving in, so that we could try to have some warmth and keep the pipes from freezing.

This of course has put a little delay in our renevation plans this week, but praise God we are all safe and it was just some trees that fell down with a little damage to our house and car.

I will try to post pictures tomorrow, I left the camera with Adam today incase he needed to take any pictures for insurance purposes.