Mother Nature Can Be Cranky

Our early morning temperature was a mere 9°.  That's our coldest so far of the season.  But we had lovely sunshine so it didn't feel too bad.

Then about mid-morning, the wind started blowing.  And, boy howdy, did it blow!

When we were eating lunch, we heard a "noise" out somewhere around the east side of the garage and wondered what had blown off, down, or away.  Upon investigation, we found the insulator on the electric pole where our grid power comes into the house was twisted off its moorings and hanging halfway down the pole.  We also found our phone lines (yes, we still have a land line phone, dinosaurs that we are) had been ripped out of the box attached to the house.  Peering through the woods, we could see electrical lines some of which were drooping in an unusual formation and some were lying on the ground.

About that time our neighbor on the east came hustling over through the road we keep open between our two places.  "I knew I should have taken down that big spruce!  I just KNEW I should have taken it down!" were the self-chastising words coming out of his mouth.  He was in the middle of a machinery crisis which frustrated him even more since he couldn't stop everything and help.

The wind had blown the tree over onto the lines coming from his property to ours and created the tangle of electrical wires and phone lines.

Being Veteran's Day, we couldn't rouse anyone at our public utilities office or our phone provider.  Long story short, we called one of the linemen who lives within a couple miles of us, told him the situation and asked who we should call to report the problem since everyone seemed to be unavailable on this holiday.  Good guy that he is, he said he'd be over as soon as he could to check out the situation.

This is the trunk of the toppled tree left after Kind-Hearted Lineman and Papa Pea got it cut up enough for repair of the damage.

It's hard to get the perspective of how big this lovely old spruce was, but it was a big 'un.

The surprising thing was that neither we nor our neighbors lost grid power during this little incident.  (We were operating on solar energy when it happened, but tested grid power and were happy to find it still working.)  

Papa Pea finally was able to get a live body (albeit one in India) to talk to about the sad state of our phone lines and the phone being inoperable. We were told a repairman would be out to look at it "sometime" tomorrow.  Never one to be stymied by a situation, my dear hubby fiddled with the wires until he got them jury-rigged so that we now have phone service again.  (We're still hoping the phone repairman makes an appearance tomorrow though.)

A beautiful, sunny, clear day and then Mother Nature decides to add high winds to the mix . . . and the picture changes.  You certainly can't be prepared well enough for any and all kinds of weather nature throws at you, although good neighbor D really wishes he had taken that big spruce tree down before Mother Nature did.