The Blustery Day

    We had a serious blustery day this week, although if came on Tuesday rather than "Windsday" ala Winnie the Pooh.  I don't know what the winds got up to but we had two tree falls.  One wasn't very tall, a big leaf maple that the goats had girdled a few years back. That one came up by the roots, but failed to do significant damage. It crushed one section of fence which wasn't actually fencing anything in at the moment. It had the decency to fall in such a way that it didn't damage any of my bee hives. The other tree fall was of much greater consequence.  One of the main upper trunks of one of the big leaf maples broke off and fell to earth.  The trunk section is about a foot in diameter at the point where it broke off the tree.  It is stretched out about seventy feet across my bamboo, my raspberry patch, my Hudson sweet cherry tree, our glass and steel picnic table and chairs, and finally taking out one of my small espalier apple trees and part of our picket fence.

The remains of our picnic table

Looking back towards the tree from which it fell

   It could have been much worse. At least two people were killed in the storm. One man's car was hit by a falling tree somewhere near Monroe.  The other fatality that I know of was electrocuted by power lines. A lot of people haves been left without power too. Depending where they live that can sometimes take as long as a week to be fixed.  We have friends who now have a tree laying through their living room.  I feel fortunate that all we have to deal with is a little inconvenience and cleaning up a mess.  The goat pen, the chicken pen and the duck pen are all still in tact.  I don't have any animal containment problems that require immediate attention. It definitely could have been much worse.  Besides, now my sweetie is telling me I need to buy a new chain saw.

The smaller maple came up by the roots

    I was at the Bee Store when we lost power there at around 4:00 pm.  Since it gets dark so early there was really no reason to sit around in the store in the dark. I just closed up and came home.  While driving home I noticed that a significant section of Snohomish was without power.  Some time after I got home, Linda sent me to the store to pick up a few things we needed. While at Fred Myers they lost their power. When I arrived home I found we were without power as well. It was a good excuse to light some candles.  The world was a much darker place before the invention of the electric light.

     On a different subject, we in the