Rantings Diversified

Yesterday morning started like any other Sunday morning. I got up around 0830 and looked outside only to see the world covered in anywhere from ¼ to a ½ inch of ice and it was still raining and freezing on contact. So I putzed around for a bit before sitting down on the couch, turning the laptop on, checking my email and whatnot. It was a little past 0900 when I heard the first, “CRASH”, outside. It was so loud that I jumped up from where I was sitting thinking that something just fell on a house. I look out the bay window only to see a large portion of a large oak tree in the middle of the road. I call my neighbor across the street Donna whose tree it is and while on the phone with her two ignorant minivan drivers come down the road and turned and drove right through my neighbor’s yard to go around the debris. Ignorant fuckers! So I get dressed, yes I was in sweats and a t-shirt, and go outside to help move it but by the time I got outside a guy in a pickup truck had pulled up, got out and tied a rope around the branch and pulled it over to in front of my house thus making a lane so as to open the road. While out there I call the township to let them know what happened and that we got the road open. No sooner than I hang up the phone a pine tree snaps in half in another neighbor’s back yard. CRASH!!! While my neighbor Steve and I are picking up wood off the street we hear trees snapping and breaking just about every ten minutes or so. Of course no sooner than I go back inside the cop shows up and is trying to move the wood off the road. I go back out to help him and he tells me the whole county has trees down and we are one of a very few areas still with power. While talking to him we hear another very loud CRASH. We both laugh and I wish him a good day. He drives around the corner and stops. I walked over to the corner only to see a huge maple tree down and across the street. As I turned to walk home another chunk of the big oak tree comes crashing down missing Donnas VW by less than a foot. Through all this not one house was hit nor one car crunched. Amazing!
I finally decided to venture out to the local 7/11 around noonish and it took me 15 minutes to dig through and then chip the ice off my car. As I drove the 10 blocks or so to the store it was a winter wonderland of arboreal destruction. Branches and whole trees down everywhere. If you look closely at the picture above you’ll see my neighbor’s fence broken about half way down their yard.