Surprise Backyard Blast!

You know I have been reading too many LOLcats when I start titling my posts with certain ones in mind. Last night, I'd just settled down to add to my word total on the book I can't re-read this week because it makes me cringe, and the wind kicked up outdoors. It kicked up so bad that it started knocking things over. Like trashcans and garden furniture, and whatever hit the transformer to the power line that provides electricity to the "new half" of our house.

Nan and I were sitting in the living room (part of the "old half") and so we only experienced a brief blip in the lights, and the TV went off, and the Internet went away. I rebooted the computer in front of me, because that seemed like the most sensible way to get the router working again. After about twenty minutes, I thought maybe I should go see if the router was having trouble synching. Turns out it wasn't on. The entire rest of the house was entirely in darkness. It was sort of like Silent Hill, without the creepy demonic things moving around in the dark. That I could see.

Luckily, there is enough old wiring in the house that each room had at least one working light, and my laziness paid off because those orange power cords I never put back in the shed came in handy for the fridge. Going by ConEd's recorded message, we seemed to be in for a few days of total unbearable darkness, day and night, with vampires and cannibals that would undoubtedly come out if I didn't plug the fridge into an outlet that had power. So I did. I can't stretch like Reed Richards, though. That would have helped.

After the rain quieted down, I ventured out into the yard to take pictures of the damage. I was not the only looney out there:



Okay, so...we didn't have damage so much as much-needed pruning of dead branches that I couldn't reach without a jetpack. That greyish thing there is a shingle, but as of yet I can't determine whose roof it came from. (Note to self: make the roofers put little happy faces on our shingles next time around. Sure.)



This was close. The forsythia's doing fine now, but that branch weighed about five pounds, man. Took me, two cats and a dog to move it.



All of our electricity was back on within a few hours, and the strong winds blew the clouds so far away that the cats thought it'd be a great idea to go out and wallow in the cold mud. I talked them out of it by putting their harnesses on and opening the door. They're not fond of wind that can blow the resin chairs around, so that ended well. I've found that just showing them what it's like out there works better than trying to explain it. They're very wary of humans selling them tales of foolishness like cold and rain and two feet of snow, and who can blame them? Even I've made the mistake of listening to weathermen over the years and ending up with a yard full of wayward chairs that looks like a WWF convention just came through. There were a lot of people who had serious damage done by the surprise storm...but that's not funny.

Surprise Backyard Blast!