Wild Week In The City

Hot days, but bearable on the porch.  The mother Mallard and her nine ducklings came strolling by, didn't care I was sitting on the porch after pulling weeds.  They waddled by me and hopped in the goldfish pond, diving and drinking and enjoying the water.  They have stopped up my new filter/pump, but that's another story.

They won't all fit in the pond soon.

I went to get more cracked corn as they strolled to the feeder.

The night before, a strong storm came through and knocked out the electricity for two hours.  The heat is what woke me.  Everything got a good watering though and it was nice on the porch.  Until another storm came through before noon.

You can just see it begin to rain on the lake.  Before too long, tornado sirens were going off, the wind was blowing 90 mph, rain coming in circles and sideways; I have never seen a more severe thunderstorm.  It was like a hurricane.  Tree limbs were coming down and I feared our roof was going to blow off.  The house was popping and cracking.  Lightning and thunder like I've never seen.

Unfortunately, I could not capture the degree to which it stormed.  You can see one of the neighbor's branches down and some in the water.  We had branches down in our yard, but a twenty foot long tree fell across the lake from us and floated in front of their dock.  That is, until it was swept over to our side.  I wanted to signal the neighbors to come get their tree, but didn't.  They also lost another large part of the tree in their yard.

More than a hundred thousand homes were without power for days (not us thank God as I couldn't bear that heat.) Trees are down across the southern part of the city.  Every house has some down.  Roofs were damaged and blown off, brick walls came down, fences down and a house nearby burned to the ground from lightning in minutes.  Even though the rain was drenching, the wind stoked the fire and it was consumed before the fire department arrived.  Within thirty minutes, the storm had passed.  All week, chainsaws have been cutting up trees.  Everyone with pickup trucks can haul their trees to a local pasture.  I don't know what those without a truck are going to do.  I've looked at the roof and no damage, so thankfully, we were let off lightly.  We still have a few limbs high up in the elm tree that are hanging, but I don't think there is any way to pull them down.

And, no I didn't hide in a closet, but I did stay inside.  It was pretty scary.  My little wind chime glass balls were whipping about.  One broke.  I was sorely tempted to run outside and tether it down, but was afraid I'd be struck by lightning over a twenty dollar wind chime.