Last week, a major storm blew through our area and caused all kinds of a mess... We were woken up at 2:50am to some of the hardest rain and winds we've seen and some ferocious lightning. It almost seemed like a strob light constantly going outside our window. The noise woke Olivia up and JR went down to get her. He brought her out to the living room and, lo and behold, there was a huge limb from the oak tree in front of Olivia's room laying in front of the house. "Funny," he said, "That wasn't there a second ago..."
It narrowly missed landing on the front porch we had built on to the house when we moved in.
The next morning, when we surveyed the damage, we found out that ours wasn't the only tree down. We were actuall penned in by trees in the road on either side of us. It wouldn't have been too bad, except that there were power lines tied up in the debris.
Ultimately, we are having to replace some gutter, a piece of our awning, a few shingles and some flashing. Oh, and our chimney cap, which we never did find.....We suspect it's somewhere in OZ right about now. Really, it could have been much, much worse.
The major portion of the tree overhangs both our house and the neighbors' so we were fortunate that that part wasn't the one that broke. Sadly, we are going to have to cut the rest of it down. You can see in the pictures that there's some bad heart-rot in the tree and it seems like some kind of bug has been eating it from the inside out. We don't want to take the chance that the next storm bring the rest of it down on our heads...
