What a Storm!

Wednesday we were hammered with the second front of an Alaskan storm.  We got almost two inches of rain but the nastiest part was the wind.  I stood in front of the woodstove, feeling its warmth on the back of my legs, gazing out of the great room windows and watched the wind drive the rain.  First the rain blew horizontal right, then left, then right, then... what the??  ... a major limb on one of the sycamore trees had broken and was splayed across the front slope.

I grabbed my camera and headed outside to get a closer look.  Water was pouring out of the broken rain gutter by the garage-to-garden door.

The break in the tree is high off the ground.  It's going to be a trick getting it down.  Rain was blowing around me as I took pictures so my apologies for the damp spots on the photos.
 

Sycamores don't usually break in the wind.  We are used to finding stray limbs from the cottonwoods and the neighbors' eucalyptus; this is the first time we've had damage to a sycamore.

I tried to take a picture that would show just how hard the wind was blowing.  Impossible.  This is the closest I got but even with the trees leaning, it doesn't do the storm justice.

At this point, my camera was seriously wet and so was I.  After five minutes outside, I had to hang my dripping jacket and change out of my soggy jeans.

This morning we surveyed the damage.  My trusty team of helpers checked the ground for squirrels.  By this morning, the tree had broken in half where the limb fell so we had two big pieces on the ground and a significantly shorter tree.

Then, to add insult to injury, when Brett fired up the tractor to haul away all the mucky wet straw from Jackson's stall he found this...

A flat tire on a tractor is not a good thing.

I did manage to find one positive result of the storm; happy flowers.

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