09:18 - 31.07.06
Blow me down
Yesterday I noticed the cats all heading downstairs about 3:30 in the afternoon. It was very still outside. Looked out the north window and realized that the sky had turned the same green that the ocean off our west coast is when the sea is quiet. Same sort of consistency too. Very odd. Recollections of the description by people who survived the last major tornado just north of our city crept into my mind. I seem to recall seeing video of the same colouring in that sky just before .... Mentally checked off where everyone was in the house. I was the only one upstairs. My youngest was in his room resting, because he had pulled some of the muscles in his back - latissimus dorsi and rhomboids - while swinging my granddaughter around the day before. He had a ticket to the folk festival for the day, but just said he didn't feel comfortable going. Just uneasy. He and the cats were safe where they were anyway. I was busy trying to get supper started in case he changed his mind and wanted to take in the evening performances. Better travelling on a full stomach you know. I decided that if it became windy, then I would head downstairs too.
About half an hour later that wind blew up just as my youngest wandered out to the south balcony. He called and asked me to look at the sky out there. "Are those clouds moving this way?" pointing to the southwest bank of thunderheads. Quite honestly, I thought we were better off seeing those arrive than the green ones hovering out over the small community to the north of us. Apparently we had wind gusts of about 87 km/hr/ 54 mph and a temperature drop of 12 degrees C/22 F in less than half an hour. Watched the evening news at six. Trees blown down and power outages all over the city. I checked our yard, but everything seemed fine at that point.
Around 11 pm my youngest emerged from his room and started cleaning up a corner of the basement so that I could shift all the boxes of elections supplies over to that one corner. Right now they take up at least half the basement and about a tenth of the upstairs too. I can't move any further forward with the renovations or revamping of the house until I can reclaim some space. Once those boxes are consolidated and the rest of the old interior cabinets and walls are removed then I can at least proceed to replace the insulation, get the tiles I bought on sale last year installed where we've torn up the flooring and move the new pantries I bought at the same time last year into the kitchen. I've been waiting for my number three son to get his van insured you see, so I have a way of hauling everything left to the landfill. It has been very hard to be patient, although being as sick as I was helped out in a weird sort of way. I haven't been physically able to do much of anything before June anyway and the prewrit work for the election needed to take priority as well.
About half an hour later, I heard him calling from the kitchen. He had stepped on a loose nail and really messed up the bottom of his foot. I suggested that he start working weekends to avoid further leisure injuries. Cleaned up the damage and sent him back to bed after the late newscast. We both were looking outside at the front yard where my sundance tree stands, because there had been video of some of the trees blown down earlier in the day. Again there seemed to be no damage. I didn't go straight to bed after that because my intuition was saying not to. About an hour later my youngest was upstairs again. His foot was swelling and it appeared he might have sprained it into the bargain. Wrapped his foot in an ice pack and ferreted out some of the tools needed to do a little more assessment of the damage to the bottom of the foot. I wondered if maybe a splinter had been missed as well when we first cleaned, medicated and bandaged it. The area he had been working on had a plywood underlay you see. Sure enough both assumptions were correct. By the time I was finished working on his foot he decided he was hungry. A mid-night snack was conjured. It was after 3 in the am when he finally hobbled off to bed. The milkman had just dropped off our weekly order at that point, so I hauled that upstairs before crawling into bed myself. I still didn't see any storm related damage in our front yard at that time.
When I got up at 7 this morning - to wake up my youngest so he could call wounded in to his work - I glanced outside and realized that there was a good part of my sundance tree lying broken on the ground. What was odd was that when I checked the street and the neighbours' yard on both sides of my home there were no broken branches or leaves lying anywhere else. Decided that maybe another gust of wind had passed through between when I had laid down and then arisen again, but it still seems really strange that the material would only land in my front yard - not even any leaves touching the neighbours' car/truck parked out front. None of the other trees front or back showed any damage either.
Decided that I'd better get the mess cleaned up right away and worked on that for about an hour and a half. First I hauled the loose branches to the gate and tossed them into the back yard. In the midst of that the neighbour on the west side of my home - the one who always parks his big old red truck in front of my house - emerged to go to work. He took a look at me working away and spat onto the road. Nothing like that sound to make one's morning - hawk and spit. They had left a full big garbage bag of theirs open on our shared property line a few days back and some of that garbage had blown into my side yard. I had picked it all up and put it back in their trash, but it had all blown back into my side yard again only moreso during the night - the wind again I guess. I was going to suggest he might want to move it to his bin, but thought better of it. Finished the one remaining strip on the front yard and examined the tree itself to see if anything else needed to be done. The other odd thing is that the branches on the one side lower down had begun to die back this month. Even though they were dry and brittle none of them blew off. I decided that I might as well remove the dead wood still on the tree. When I'd finished that task, I moved into my back yard and hauled everything to the garden that I didn't get planted this year. Sigh. If I had a fireplace I guess I would consider it a bonus that I had free firewood. Maybe that's a cosmic hint that I should get one for the basement. We'll see. Right now though I think I'm going to try and get a little more sleep and hope I get more dreams with directions for the renovations. Paperwork to complete this afternoon - I hope.
�
�
