another interesting weekend in the great white north

Summer started literally with a bang  at our house this year.  At 12:04 a.m. on June 21 summer began and overnight we had thunder and lightening and yes of course, more rain.  It woke all of us up and that is hard to do, let me tell you.  Next up:  why yes, let’s have some more rain shall we? ut this time it’s coming down in buckets and sheets.  I have never seen rain come down so fast and so hard in all my life.  And yes, of course, we had water in the basement, again.  Our ground is so saturated that it has nowhere else to go but inside.

Along with this torrential downpour we were treated to 50-60 mph winds.  At one point my husband called for me to look at our birch tree(s) whipping around.  At about that same time I looked out the window and what did I see?

Half our maple tree had come down with those wicked winds.  The photo above was the next morning.  It was a bit darker outside when it first came down.

About a half hour later we heard a big boom and the power went out.  Initially the power company said it would be back on in two hours.  I think that was before they heard how bad this storm was.  The first night was actually sort of fun.  We got out the flashlights and discovered that not all the flashlights worked.  But we had enough to get through the night. I was happily reading and doing puzzles by flashlight.

The next morning our neighbor came over and as soon as she saw our tree she yelled for her hubby to bring the chainsaw.  Thank goodness for neighbors with chainsaws is all I can say because I was starting to add up the cost of removing the maple.

As a form of gratitude,  we let them take a bunch of the wood for their fireplace.

Here’s what we needed to bring to the brush site:

But first, all that work made us hungry so off to Conny’s Creamy Cone, one of our favorite places for burgers, fries and malts.

By Saturday afternoon when we still had no power we began removal of items in the fridge/freezer.  Luckily we were between meat purchases so only lost frozen potatoes and chicken nuggets, not much of either of those really.  Really thankful we didn’t lose more.  Had to toss most of a tub of chocolate ice cream and a brand new package of ice cream sandwiches.  I have two cups of pureed pumpkin from last fall and two cups of chopped rhubarb that I need to do something with soon.  Everything from the fridge and some frozen green pea soup went into coolers and we used 78 lbs. of ice last weekend:

We had so much to bring to the brush site including other pieces of trees that had fallen into both yards that it took us two trips, both times we had to wait in line.  This is on the street before you turn onto the street that leads down to the brush site:

After turning the corner:

More vehicles waiting to get in as we left:

We discovered that our telephone pole broke and it was the transformer at the top of that pole that went boom in the night:

Not the best photo but you can tell there’s something not quite right with that pole right?  A couple more poles about a mile from us that have since been replaced:

By now it’s dinner time and we had enough bacon and eggs for a meal so we got out the Coleman stove, lit it up and within ten minutes or so, dinner was served:

Luckily a $50 rebate came in the mail so we spent it on booze!!  Now I’m ready for another night without power:

And just so y’all get the flavor of how long and exhausting this weekend was, here’s some photos from trip two to the brush site Sunday morning:

And again more in line as we left:

We filled in the time while waiting for the energy guys to fix our pole by mowing and just generally sitting around and doing nothing. Finally three guys show up in our neighbor’s yard “are you the energy guys?” Turns out they were from Michigan. I had heard that crews from 14 states had come to help with the hundreds of thousands of us, mostly in the twin cities metro, who were without power because of Friday night’s storm.  As of Saturday morning 250k customers were without power in the metro area.  By mid Saturday it was down to 112k, by Sunday morning closer to 100k.

Finally a truck shows up:

We set up the lawn chairs in our front yard and watched the show.  Fritz joined us:

After what seemed like an eternity, the new pole is erected:

About 30 minutes later after they dink around with the pole and make sure it’s steady and, oh yea, get the new transformer attached to the pole, we had power once again!!

Fritz was rather interested in the whole operation.  Either that or he just likes hangin’ with his mom and dad:

Have you ever been without power for longer than a day?  We’ve been lucky here.  This was the longest we’ve been without power in this house, almost exactly 48 hours.  We lose power occasionally and it returns within a reasonable time frame.  This was some storm.  I forgot to mention that hubby noticed two of our evergreens out front that grew together are now a bit further apart than before the storm.  After inspection of them we found a large crack at the base right between the two trunks, if they were two trunks.  Well, they are now and the arborist said they have to come down.  When it rains, it pours I guess.  The good news is that nobody and no property was damaged.  The silver lining is that our once broken ice maker has magically healed itself.  I guess it just needed to be thawed out.