We had quite a lot of wet, heavy snow (especially for April, in this part of the world) falling very quickly yesterday morning. It was lovely…until the crashing started all through the neighborhood. The firs around the house lost some huge branches, and as a result there’s a call in to the insurance company. I’m sure there were a rash of similar calls, because even though the deadly silence of snow you could hear the breaking and thudding everywhere.
This particular limb is hanging across the deck; it landed on the roof crosswise and slid, bending the gutter and punching through the deck’s upright slats. There’s another one just as big lying over it up on the roof proper, and you can see both from the front of the house, over the roof-crest. This is just a sliver of the damage the storm did. You can also see a bit of the leftover slush-ice, which is lingering in shaded patches.
So far the insurance company seems genuinely helpful, but that’s no indication. All my phalanges are crossed, because it’s a lot of fallen crap and we simply can’t get to the roof to figure out if it’s whole. I guess we’ll find out when the thunderstorms move in later today?
Added to that, the faucet in the kids’ loo needs replacing. Fortunately the Princess likes puzzles and home repair, so she’s given Yours Truly a list of supplies, which are wending their way through the supply chain. It’s…very odd, to have someone in the house to rely on. I’m used to doing everything alone, world without end, amen. Learning to loosen my grip a little and accept help is quite a journey.
The zero draft of Hell’s Acre‘s Season One is finished, and the last chapter will probably go out to subscribers this week. I am spiking for the finish of the Sekrit Projekt’s zero, too–the VC Andrews/Cat People thing–and that will be lovely to have off my docket. It’s possessed me for long enough, I think.
They’re saying thunderstorms and wintry mix today, so that’s going to be grand. There’s still snow on the roofs too, though it seems to have largely melted off boughs–which is a mercy, because more rain atop the wet slush is heavy and could bring down even more weakened limbs, and we’ve had quite enough of that, thank you.
And that’s all the news I can think of this morning while my coffee cools. We could have done without this, but if it had to happen, at least the tree-arms didn’t fall point-first. Any one of the fallen could have punched straight through both floors if they’d hit wrong. So we’re fortunate in that respect, and I am thanking every lucky star I can think of.
At least nothing’s hitting the roof this morning. The dogs were quite put out with both the absence of walkies and the constant noise of impacts all through yesterday. Boxnoggin was a nervous wreck and even Miss B got a little tetchy, pressing close to my leg and looking up at me as if to say just make it stop, Mum, why are you doing this? Poor thing, she’s dead convinced I had some sort of control over what was happening. It’s probably too terrifying for her to contemplate otherwise.
Tuesday promises to be busy, but at least I can crawl into work for a short while and escape. (Unless some-damn-thing else happens.) I do have a SquirrelTerror tale to tell you (how Boxnoggin got tangled up in windchimes) but that’ll have to wait for another day.
See you around.