Some More Pictures, For Your Enjoyment and Edification

I entitle this picture "Good Morning!" This was my first view out the upstairs window, taken a little later when the day got brighter. The branch down just to the right of the plowtruck's tailgate took down the power lines and ripped a piece of siding off the house, which you can now see dangling gaily in the wind. The phone lines to the left are untouched, despite the branches below them. Darn it all. If the phone lines were replaced, maybe Mojo could have switched to DSL. Oh well. Say La Vee.

Basically the same view, from the ground floor. Yes, all of our outbuildings are pieces of trash that came with the house and need to be replaced. No, we haven't replaced them, yet. Why, you ask? Why do you think? Laziness. And Mojo's ability to Predict the Future and not replace them until they are smashed to bits in an ice storm. Ditto the wires ripped from the house. You may recall I noticed that earlier this summer, but did Mojo fix it then? No. She is SO SMART she just KNEW they'd only come down again, so she cunningly waited. Hah!

A lovely icy view of our backyard blackberry patch. You can just see the garden fence on the far left if you squint. Luckily for us a few years back we logged a bunch of white pines and moved the treeline back about a hundred feet. Otherwise the end to this story might not be so happy. The house was completely surrounded by fallen limbs and trees, but they all missed the house.

Speak of the devil! The treeline of white pines, now far far away from the house. If you squint on the very right hand side you can see what looks like a broken limb. That's actually the top twenty feet of one of the trees, snapped off and flung top first to the ground. It's sticking about ten or fifteen feet up in the air. Usually these pines break if you just look at them funny, but most of the branches that came down this time were oak and maple. Remember to bend, not break, folks! Still if you thought I was going to get closer than this for a picture, you're nuts. Big heavy things were falling all weekend, dude.Even the ice just shedding off the trees was coming down bigger than golf balls. Mojo likes her head too much to have more holes punched in it from above.

The remains of our Adirondack chairs around the firepit. One was untouched; the other three (plus the table) have been smashed to smithereens. Plus the firepit is filled with about two feet of water, so we're not burning anytime soon. This is the very tip of a good sized oak that came down. Next year's firewood!

Here you see our woodshed survive, but barely. Notice the fatal bow in the roof on the left side. These look like plain ol' branches, but they're both around 8--10 inches in diameter at the base, and when they're loaded with ice they easily weigh hundreds of pounds heavier than "just" a branch.Granted, this building wasn't much in the first place, but having it nearly cleaved in twain guarantees it's probably coming down this summer.(I replaced a bunch of windows in the house a while back and they are there waiting for a trip to the dump--not a pane broken! And while there is the Deathtrap sitting where it died, seemingly amidst the chaos, there's not a twig actually on the car, darn it.)

Just a pretty picture of some red-barked maple saplings covered in ice. With branches down behind it, but I don't think it's possible to take a picture WITHOUT broken branches down somewhere in the picture.

I think the video I shot will be much cooler. I will try to get it up sometime next week. But for now, I shall merely revel in the lights coming on when I happen to hit the switches...

Mojo