The Blowing

The other night I let the girls watch a recorded iCarly special on the big LCD TV downstairs (usually they're stuck on their little 26 inch tube TV in the loft). Since I didn't want to watch TV on the inferior TV, I was stuck watching their show with them. In it the characters made a short video about a scary, terrible storm that was threatening the city. It was called, "The Blowing". Well, with the storms sweeping across the West Monday night we had our own "Blowing" and it had some pretty crazy results.

Katrina and I were woken up in the middle of the night on Monday to rain that was pelting against our windows. It was really loud and sounded like someone was throwing rocks at the side of our house. We were very surprised that we didn't have terrified kids knocking on our bedroom door.

When I got up in the morning I looked out the backdoor and saw that the wind had scattered all the items from our back porch all over the yard. Gloves, buckets, flip-flops, and even the BBQ grill had been swept or moved by the wind. While driving to work, there were branches all over the road, Christmas decorations had been torn from neighbors houses, and the power company estimated that over 100,000 city residents were without power for the night and more than half the next day. I drove through a two block section of town that was pitch black (including traffic lights) and police were directing traffic.

I thought that we made it unscathed through the storm since we didn't have any broken windows and we don't have any Christmas decorations to scatter around. That is, I thought that until I tried to drive out of our driveway and had to swerve from hitting the branches of the tree in our front yard that were uncharacteristically in my way.



I konw these pictures don't do it justice but upon closer inspection it looked like the storm had started to pull the tree completely out of the ground - the earth was bulging and cracking on one side - and it was tipping over. It wasn't completely knocked down but it was leaning at about a 45 degree angle and definitely couldn't stay that way.

So I did the only logical thing I could. I drove my truck into our neighbor's front yard (don't worry, these are the ones that abandoned the house), tied a rope from the tree to my truck, put the truck in 4-wheel drive, and pulled the tree straight.



I tied it to a stake in the ground and stomped all the surrounding earth back down and I guess we'll see if this is a permanent solution. Below I did my best to take a before and after picture of the tree. I know they might not look that different but seeing the tree in person was pretty crazy. I know it looks like the tree is still leaning but it always leaned that way a little and I didn't want to pull it out of the ground the opposite way. However, pending Katrina's inspection and approval it might need a little more straightening. Do you see how close those branches were to touching the driveway?!?




I mean, who expects their tree to get uprooted in a wind storm? Seriously, it's not like this is Oklahoma.