Worst is behind us

TOPWLH had cat feeding duties today and expressed a desire to ride her bicycle over to the cats' residence.  She is free to now admit that attempting this ride on her second outing of the year was a tad too ambitious.  I myself found it to be a hard ride, too windy on the outbound leg.

But we got our corn on the 4th of July photo.

The corn got off to a horrible start.  Lots of water and long days are good for corn though and I am pleased to note that our local corn field has produced plants that are almost waist high as of today.

Friday evening last the big storm blew through where we live.  We have dodged lots of them but this one nailed us big time, a major hit.

The power went off in the early evening.  Daylight brought this view of our deck.

We also lost some shingles but the exterior damage was minor, especially considering what happened around us.

This is our next door neighbor.

Up at the end of the street this one blocked about half of our street.  South from this about a half block another similar event blocked half of Fairview, the main street.

The new drainage facility functioned as designed.  It did NOT keep the street from flooding but it kept the flooding at a lower level.  This is what they told us would happen.  Other neighborhoods in our watershed need similar projects before the drainage will occur rapidly enough to keep us from having, as we did this time, about a foot of water over the street in the low spot down at the middle of the block.

Yes, there was a time there when we were marooned.

By morning the new hole was pretty much empty except for this.  I entertained several of my neighbors as we walked about viewing the damage by telling them I had a dead seal in the hole in the ground next to my house.

The dead seal was amusing only briefly.  Problems at the neighbors house were compounded by the fact that that tree took down the power line from the pole in back to their house.  They were the only customer with an outage as a result of that particular event.  That meant that they were at the back of the line to get reconnected and eventually went almost four days without power.

Ours came on after about 15 hours, too late to save the basement.

But the worst is now behind us, the bad things still ahead mostly involve negotiating with the insurance and writing of large checks to get us back to our comfort zone.

We probably need a new roof, we are going to acquire a back up natural gas generator, the kind that starts automatically upon the interruption of electrical service.  We are determined that this can never happen again on our watch.

That check promises to be large.

Bicycling has been a bit sporadic but I have gotten out.  I ride this path through Grass Lake with some regularity during the week when people on foot are not very numerous.

This day I had to lift my bicycle over the fallen trees to complete the ride.

But the worst is behind us, today I felt enough like blogging to try it again.  We shall see how it goes going forward.  The insurance adjuster is supposed to call within 3 business days to set up an appointment.  The generator guy will come out to give me an estimate on Thursday.

Stay tuned.