Some Weather Excitement

Yesterday was an interesting day. It started off with our Men's Fellowship meeting in the AM. We have such a good group of guys, typically 6-8 of us make it on any given Wed AM. We spend the first 45-60 minutes eating breakfast and catching up with news. The next 45-60 minutes is spent learning how to become better Christian men. We are currently using "The Joshua Code, 52 Scripture Verses Every Believer Should Know", by O. S. Hawkins. It is the 3rd one of his books that we have used as the basis for our discussions. All of them were good, this one may be the best yet.

Then it was off to Jefferson City get some fish food, pickup a couple of treated 2x4's at Menards for a home project (putting up some lattice panels at one end of the front porch), and buying a set of ramps to use when changing the oil in my truck. My old ramps didn't survive the post-retirement downsizing and moving around. I'm tired of stacking up boards to drive up on.

In the afternoon we had some exciting weather. The first storm went through around 2 PM. We got a little hail and a bunch of much needed rain, 2.75" between 2PM & 11PM yesterday. 2" of it came in about 30 minutes. It came to fast to really soak in, but any moisture is good moisture this summer. Kathy & I stood in the LR looking out at the trees bending and we agreed that the winds were the highest we have experienced while living here. After the rain has stopped we went out for a walkabout and found evidence that, indeed the winds had been quite strong.

The top of one of the trees in our front yard had broken off. I probably need to get some tree people out here to clean up damage to the tree. Hopefully the damage won't kill it.

The top of the tree is now in the front yard.

A tree in the side yard was uprooted. The soil around the root of a tree about 10' away from this one was disturbed. I think it almost went over. The section of chain link in the photo was left leaning against this tree and another when we moved here. We don't have any fence. I think this may have been a 10' gate section that the pack rats we bought the house from had picked up somewhere.

We have quite a few limbs down elsewhere on the property. Part of a decent size limb is partially in the pond.

The good news is that we have plenty of trees trees that could have fallen on our house or vehicles, but none did, thank you Lord. We also walked up the drive and checked out the homes of our 2 neighbors at the top of our driveway. Both of them had some limbs down but none had fallen on their homes or vehicles. The last I heard Kelsey, Andy & kids also had no significant storm damage.

At 2:08PM our power went out, not a surprise with the high winds we were experiencing. About 400 homes in our area were without power. Initially the power company said the power would be back on by 4:30PM, which seemed a really optimistic estimate.

About 4 PM the revised the time for completion of repairs to 8:30PM. I started to get a little concerned about losing the contents of our 2 refrigerators and our freezer. I knew they would be OK until 8:30, & probably OK even overnight if we limited the amount of times we opened the doors, but I wondered about the accuracy of the 8:30 repair completion time.

We have a 3,000 watt, propane fired, generator that I bought to use with the travel trailer. It was the largest one that I could lift into the back of my truck, and it is all we need for travel trailer. I dug it out from under a bench in the shed, hooked up a propane tank and fired it up. 8-10 pulls on the rope and it fired up and ran fine. It isn't large enough to run our well pump but it is large enough to run at least one, maybe even two of our three refrigerator/freezers. I did an inventory and determined that, if necessary, a trip to the hardware in the morning to buy a couple of inexpensive fittings, would be all I needed to "backfeed" power to the house from the shed. I figured that if I shut off the main breaker in the electrical panel in the house there should be no danger of power feeding back into the utility company power lines. Then we could have shut off all breakers and turned on 1 at a time to rotate feeding power to the refrigerators and freezer.

At that point I plugged cord from the travel trailer into the generator and fired up the AC in the trailer. There was still around 30 gallons of water in the fresh water tank on the trailer (left over from when I sanitized/flushed the water system in the spring). I also turned on the gas fired hot water heater. I figured if the power wasn't back on by 8:30 we could take showers in the trailer and spend a comfortable night sleeping in it.

The storm had dropped the temperatures considerably and the temperatures inside the house were comfortable. About 7:30 I went out to the trailer, took a shower and then went back into the house. About 8:00 I went to bed, Kathy stayed up. I had a little trouble getting to sleep without my CPAP, but not bad. I had checked the power companies web site when I went to bed and they were estimating that power would be restored at 10:30.

Around 9PM I was awakened by another storm that came through. I will have to wait for it to get light outside to see if we sustained any damage from it. I went back to sleep almost immediately. About 10:00 I was awakened again when the bedside lamp came on. I put on my CPAP mask, shut the light off and was back asleep in short order. At 3AM I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep so I got up, transferred photos from my phone to my laptop and am writing this post. Its now 5AM and I will probably go back and sleep for another hour or so. Need to get rested for cleaning up all the limbs 😊.

The big news is that Lydia starts kindergarten today (Thursday). Andy will drop her off at school in the mornings, otherwise she would have to get up earlier for a lengthy bus ride. She will get off the bus at the top of our driveway and spend a few hours with Grammy & Papa.

God is good, may He bless you and yours.