Absoblogginlutely! - IRL

Well almost….. The tree guys eventually turned up on Thursday this week – they were meant to have been here Monday, and the downed tree has now been removed. The stump and the other half of the tree remains – we’ll have to get rid of that soon as it’s not stable. However most tree companies are charging silly rates at the moment so we’ll wait a while for the work to die off.

This morning I finished chopping up the rest of the fallen limbs and carting them out to the front of the garden to be picked up by Dublin. The guys did a great job earlier in the week picking up the wood from the front garden and so I had space to fill it all back up with the back garden. I had another big branch suspended from the tree out the back, but this one was not nearly as painful (in all manners of speaking) to remove – it came out pretty quickly and with no injuries unlike the first branch which left me feeling like ^{I should be blogging in superscript for a few days}

I now have all the small twigs and leaves to rake up which will be a job for the rest of this week in the evening – hopefully it won’t take too much time – still on the bright side with the amount of branches that fell, thats a lot fewer leaves to rake up this year.

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I’ve posted a few of the pictures of the trees that fell when Hurricane Ike blew through Ohio. The crazy thing is that North Carolina (that was meant to get the hurricanes earlier in the week) was hardly affected. Hopefully some tree surgeons will be here tomorrow and my insurance people will be talking to his insurance people. Hopefully they do bother to show up rather than go somewhere else as we need to talk to them about taking the other trees down.

I actually went and got an electric chain saw from Lowes yesterday to try and tidy up some of the damage. Amazingly they still had some saws left, but only a choice of 2 electric or 2 gas powered ones. As the electric was $60 and the gas ones $250 I got the electric (as we have power).  I was surprised at how well it works and was very pleased that I got it rather than a hand saw. It was a slight risk as the next time we have a storm we may not have power, but I figured that if we don’t have power it’s unlikely that I’m going to want to start chopping branches up anyway.

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We’re heading back to Ohio today. The weather makes it nicer to leave at 5.30am when it is chucking it down with rain and being really windy - makes you feel you are not missing much beach weather. On the down side, it means you have to drive through wind and rain - ugh.

Sometimes you just wish you could click your heels together three times - it would certainly make the journey quicker.

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In ironic news, Ohio was affected worse by the hurricanes than the Outer Banks - we ended up without power for a day in Ohio but didn’t have any hurricane outages in the Outer Banks (although we did have a power outage when the weather was gorgeous).  The good news is we now have power back at the house - I was able to find this out by checking to see if I could connect to our internet router back home - when I was able to do this I knew the power was back.  The bad news is that we have two trees down in the garden.  One is across the driveway and the other narrowly missed the next door neighbours house.  Not looking forward to dealing with those two.

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Woke up this morning (at 4am) to the sound of thunder and then a short while later to bright flashes of lightning.  The thunder continued to about 6.30 and so I’ve been up for ages.  It’s still raining and it is too depressing to look out of the window and attempt to see the sea.  On the bright side I’m tanking through some of the books in the house - I’ve already read three books and am about about a third of the way through the fourth.  So far we’ve managed to get down to the beach for about 50% of the days we’ve been here - the funny thing is when the hurricane hit they didn’t bother to put the red flags up on the beach to forbid swimming - but the day after, when there looked like there were some nice waves, the flags were flying.  The following day the flags were down though so I borrowed the boogie board and went into the surf.  The waves were pretty rough and totally wiped you out after about 10 minutes in the water - I went in about 3 times, lost my baseball hat in the waves  and spent the rest of the time in the shade of the umbrella catching up on the reading. Still managed to get (a little) sunburnt though - the worst of it being on the top of my feet and the back of my hands.  Hopefully this doesn’t continue and I don’t come back to the office looking like a lobster!  I’ve posted the sunset pictures taken after Hurricane Hanna - so far we’ve not had other nice sunsets - the sun has just set rapidly without any nice cloud patterns or colours.

We’ve seen a fair amount of wildlife, several lizards, one deer in the backyard, dolphins at sea and everyone else has seen the local fox - I’ve not seen it yet

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Today’s lolcat had a funny picture - all the more funny as the litter box in this photo is the same kind that we got - thankfully none of our cats have tried this yet.

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