After the storm

Yet again a stretch of too hot and too humid ended last evening with a violent storm. This one was severe enough to chase us to the basement, a somewhat unusual occurrence. While we were huddled under the stairs, well, OK, not really, but we WERE in the basement, we heard two different media reports of a tornado sighting at Larpenteur and Snelling. That's only about a mile away.

The rain came in sheets for a while accompanied by strong straight line winds but nothing seemed to swirl, at least not in the area that we could witness. We didn't even lose power, the storm quickly passed and we went to bed a bit relieved.

Here's what we found in our back yard this morning.That's a cottonwood tree and a cottonwood doesn't need much wind to throw down a bunch of sticks. Still, that's about the largest one we have had down in quite a long spell.

I set out on my bicycle today to try to find evidence of the tornado. There are lots of sticks on the streets and even a few largish branches down over near Larpenteur and Snelling but no evidence of any tornadic winds at ground level.

This is about the most impressively damaged tree I came across while out riding.I came home to discover that TOPWLH had made a significant dent in yard clean up but she had left all the big stuff for me. I got my trusty Swede saw and after what I consider to be an impressively strenuous bit of manual labor for a retired lawyer, order has been more or less restored to the back yard.Those are different muscles than I usually use and I expect to be sore tomorrow. On the other hand, the bicycling went very well.