This Is Getting Old

Wednesday night after I posted about my thumb, I was reading blogs and listening to the radio and after the second big weather alert came on I started watching the radar screen on the TV in here. It did not look good. About 3:00 I went to the big TV in the living room because it has full cable and I could watch the special local network weather channels. They were LIVE, which meant they felt a need to inform at 3:00 a.m. That's not good. About 3:15 I woke up My Sweetie and we watched for about 15 minutes as the rain started to pound and the wind whipped up and then POOF! The power went out and about 2 minutes later the alert sirens went off, so I jumped in the closet. It was all very loud and there was some small hail, but no big pounding hail like last year. All the whooshing and pounding rain lasted about 20 minutes or so. We went out to the car in the garage to check the radio and the giant vertical line of storms had moved on so we went to bed. The power popped back on just before 5:00. I was smart and had unplugged the TV so it wouldn't come on and wake us up, but just all the regular house sounds like the ceiling fan, fridge and whatnot coming on woke me up.
~
When My Sweetie got up he checked our yard and roof and said we only lost one large branch from our big tree in the backyard. He went on to work and later when I got up and opened the front door, I saw all this in my neighbor's yard:

So I grabbed my camera and snapped a picture and decided to check out our backyard. This was the big branch he saw:

But what he didn't see was the REALLY BIG branch that was still hanging in the tree:

This is the spot, high up in the tree, it snapped from, but it is still hanging on by a few strands of wood:

Around 5:00, I drove to the drugstore and there were branches all over the place and some trees just snapped right off about halfway up. I wish I had taken my camera, but as I was at a light, I remembered my phone and snapped the picture at the top of a mangled carwash. (It's my first phone pic on my blog.) There was a really mangled used car dealership, but the picture did not come out well. My friend Carole had a lot of damage to a Maple in her front yard. All we lost in the front was a lot of mistletoe from our trees, but that is a good thing.

~

I really feel bad for the one house I passed. There was the tree in the yard with a little circle of flowers around it, but about 5 1/2 feet up it was just a fresh wood point, like a manic giant had whittled a crude spear tip. And there were no branches in their yard. I wonder where their treetop went?