Aftermath

Hi! We have electricity back on as of 11 am Monday! Running water, electric lights, internet! And the ability to check email and upload pictures.

This is the main tree we lost close to the house, a fair-sized maple that had three or four large upper branches snapped off and flung all over.
Several of these branches are hung up in the Scotch pine and the juniper bush next to the tree. It's going to be a giant-sized game of jackstraws getting those branches down.

The second picture is outside the fence, looking back towards the tree. The branch that landed on the fence hit between two fence posts and crushed the top rail.

And this is what's left of the tree. A lot thinner than we are used to! My husband had been talking out pruning some branches out of this tree. Now he just has to cut up all the branches that were broken out of it.

Now I get to talk about storms.
Our first storm was the Thursday night/Friday morning one, with all the lightning. Locally we had a lot of trees down.

Friday morning my husband drove into town for hot coffee and wireless WiFi. We went around a couple of trees in the road before I woke up enough to remember I had the camera.

When we got home, I put on rubber boots and took pictures of other tree damage.

This big maple tree was by the old barn foundation. *crunch*
And this catalpa tree next to the driveway used to be vertical.

I didn't get pictures yet of the wild cherry trees that snapped off, one across my walking path, and another near our fire pit.

We didn't notice this until Saturday, on the way home from using the library's wireless internet:The electric pole right down the street from our house was down. Hmm, that could be why we had no power!

But I've skipped ahead a bit.

Friday afternoon my husband decided to take our son to the movies. They got back in the evening, and I told my husband that I had called the power company's automated call center for a power restoration estimate. The first time we called, it was Saturday at 4 pm. The new estimate was Sunday at 4:30 pm.

I said if we were going to have to wait two more days for electricity, we should probably go buy some dry ice in the morning, in order not to lose the contents of the refrigerator and freezer.

My husband said, "It's not that late - we could go now and be back in an hour!" (Listen closely, boys and girls - this is called foreshadowing.)

In normal weather conditions, or even a normal rainstorm, it's about half an hour's drive up to Holland, Michigan. And it was not raining when we left the house.

We drove into a heavy rainstorm. As we neared Holland, the semi ahead of us turned its hazard lights on. I said, "You know, it's awfully rainy, and we're getting close to the spot on the highway that floods when it's really wet."

My husband and the semi got off the highway at the next exit.

Whereupon we spent several hours driving - or rafting - through the flooded low spots of Holland, attempting to get to the store that sold dry ice. I saw some things I've never seen before in real life: water spurting up through the holes in a manhole cover. A manhole cover actually floating on a stream of water forcing its way up through the manhole. Cars stuck in water that turned out to be up to their windows. More emergency vehicles than I've ever seen in my life.

If I had been driving by myself I'm not sure I would have made it back home, let alone to the store. But my husband has an amazing sense of direction, and he is one of the best adverse-conditions drivers I know. (Learning to drive 5 ton dump trucks on the obstacle course for the National Guard might have something to do with this.)

Anyway, number one, he never got lost in the dark, despite having to turn around and go back on multiple roads deep in storm water. And number two, he never flooded out our little Honda, with six inches of ground clearance, in water that we could feel splashing the underneath of the car, and even in the waves made by the people who tried to speed through it.

I don't know how long these stories stay available, but here are a couple about the flooding in Holland. Link 1, link 2

Number three? We got our dry ice, and then Mr. Amazing drove through the dark away from the lowlands of Holland, off to the east and south, and got us home.

About three hours and something later, we got home, stuffed dry ice into the freezer and a chunk in the fridge, and went to bed.

Tomorrow: the lost art of the sponge bath. And how to carbonate ice cream!