Monday morning we headed out to camp and had a wonderful week there. It was great seeing everyone again, staff and campers both. Every year we see some new faces and some familiar ones aren't there, which is kind of sad. But, it's how life goes and I'm always happy to see the ones who return year after year.
We spent the week at Rent-a-Grandma's house since she lives much closer to camp than we do, and WE stayed at home to keep things going here, including feeding the animals and all that other fun stuff. Tuesday night - or, I guess it was actually Wednesday morning - at 1:30am, I got a text. I couldn't figure out who was texting me and hubs told me to turn my stupid phone off. But, with WE home alone, I thought I'd better check things out. Yep, it was a text from him. It simply said: I just got home, the garage blew away. There's nothing but a cement slab. I figured I'd better call him. He said he'd been at his girlfriend's house when the weather got bad. They had him stay there until the storm blew over, well, it blew over alright. First he had to drive about 20 mph because there was so much hail on the road that the truck was hydroplaning. He turned onto our road, relieved he was almost home, only to see our neighbors tree across the road. He took the ditch to get around it, then turned into our driveway. He was going to park in the garage when he saw that it wasn't there. High winds had blew it completely over. That's when he sent me the text. He said by that time all he could do was laugh - what else you gonna do?? After we talked on the phone, he went inside only to find out the power was out. He made his way upstairs in the dark and toward his bedroom and tripped over his bedroom door, which really disoriented him, since when he left, his bedroom door was closed, now it was lying on the floor of his room. He's also left the patio door in the living room open, the wind had blown the sofa cushions right off the couch. Further inspection the next day showed that our barn must have lifted up slightly and settled back down, because some of the support beams were laying on the ground. We got off easy compared to some. WE's girlfriend's family had 3 barns blow over and the tops of their silos taken off. This is what our garage looks like now, poor Diesel is a little confused.
You can't tell from looking at the picture, but there used to be a peach tree where the garage is now laying. There's just some branches sticking out from under the roof, kind of like the wicked witch of the east's legs in the Wizard of Oz, minus the singing Munchkins. That white thing in the background is the garage door. It skimmed right over the top of our LP tank, there's some red paint scrapes along the top of the tank, but that's it, which is great, because that could have been a dangerous mess. The insurance guy is coming over this week to check out the damage.
All told, two tornadoes came through that night, one about 15 miles south of Rent-a-Grandmas house - though the town where she lives only had some branches down - we didn't even lose power. But a church in the tornado's path was destroyed. The second tornado came down about 7 miles west of our house, took out a ton of trees, barns and big metal electric poles. It must have come right down our road since there's very little damage north or south of us, but there's tons of damage directly to the east and west of us. We had 2 lawn chairs on our front porch, one of the chairs was pulled off the porch, went around to the back of the house, either blew over a 4 ft fence or over our used-to-be-garage, and ended up in the back of the garden. The chair next to it didn't even lose its cushion. Strange stuff. Fortunately, there were no deaths or injuries that I've heard of, despite the fact that the National Weather Service or someone else was sleeping on the job and half of the towns hit didn't even have their tornado sirens going.
We didn't bother coming home to check things out, we figured the mess wasn't going anywhere, so we got home about 7 Friday night and did some clean-up. We did more cleaning on Saturday, then headed almost all the way back toward Rent-A-Grandma's for a wedding. I didn't really want to go, I was pretty exhausted from the whole crazy week, but I'm glad we did. I saw a bunch of people I knew, but from all different areas of my life. There were 4 people that I knew from church, our friend who goes in with us with our broiler chickens (which are happily cheeping away in the bathtub), my cousin, his wife and kids and one of Angel #2's friends that she hung out with last summer when she was working out of town. Most of those people didn't know the other ones, so it was just kind of weird for me to see them all in the same place. The reception was held in a remodeled barn and they did a wonderful job decorating it with burlap table clothes and mason jars holding candles and sheaves of wheat. It was a really neat looking set-up and fit right in with the wedding invitation we received announcing that "Talia and Brian were gettin' hitched".
WE left on Saturday morning to spend a few days with Angel #1 at the military base in San Diego - it's #1's last leave before his deployment on the 22nd. Angel #4 joined the high school football team as a manager, so she'll be going to practices 6 days a week until school starts. WE starts cross country practices a week from tomorrow. I can't believe the summer is going by so fast. September 3rd we'll all be back at school. This week should be fairly calm and normal, with only #4's school orientation on Wednesday night for me to deal with. I can use a little break from crazy.
1 comment:
Glad WE was safe! Sorry about your garage, though.
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