After Irene

It has been an interesting week here in central Connecticut. We were fortunate enough not to lose power during the hurricane or immediately after it. However, our cable internet went down a day or so after the storm, and didn't return until late Thursday. Then we finally did lose our electricity Friday night...just as power was returned to the rest of the neighborhood. In retrospect it was a bit amusing. All the houses that had been powerless since Sunday suddenly got their electricity back...while all the houses that had somehow managed to avoid power loss suddenly were in the dark five days after the storm. Thankfully the line crews fixed the problem this morning, so I am FINALLY able to post this blog.

Chandler and I took a walk around the neighborhood after the storm had died down during the late afternoon. We were fortunate that storm damage seemed to be limited, compared to what was reported in other parts of Connecticut. Mostly there was a lot of twigs and leaves. Very few trees seemed to be toppled because of the saturation of the ground. Some of the huge older oaks (and a single buttonball) were harder hit, missing huge portions that had simply snapped off.

I'm taking over the narration here.
This is a view me posing in our driveway, and the aforementioned leaves and sticks.
Notice that the power lines are nicely where they are supposed to be. Yay!

The view down the street. Leaves and sticks everyplace, thankfully no trees.


Uh oh...now this was a problem.
Most of the top of this old oak snapped off and landed on the power lines.
It wiped out the electricity on all of Coach Road.



Here is another view. We didn't get very close.



Everything was wet, but there were still a lot of interesting things to sniff.


The clouds were moving rapidly overhead and had fascinating textures to them.
Most of the big wind gusts had died down, but there was still a decent breeze.



This is one of the few trees that simply toppled over.
It's fairly young; maybe it didn't have enough time to grow a decent root structure

Here is another one of those big oaks that broke.

Luckily, this one landed in the middle of somebody's backyard,

doing little damage.

After we got back from our walk, Rowan decided she wanted to go outside and munch grass.

Fortunately a downed sumac was the limit to the hurricane damage in our yard.

Actually, the sumac belongs to the neighbor; it just fell in our yard.

It was a good thing none of these toppled over.

...of course, Mom found this four leaf clover in the yard,

so we just have to be thankful for our luck during this storm.