Ice Storm

These are pictures taken from my backyard this evening. As you can see, we have quite a few trees behind our house. Thanks to another ice storm, it is going to be another long night of praying our house is ok from trees falling and the power stays on. Many of you know that we went 9 days last year without power. Luckily, the trees have been trimmed in our area so that helps with power lines, but trees have a way of falling in strange ways. Tonight, when I got home from work, Mike wanted to clear out the branches that had already fallen in our backyard. I went outside with him and noticed one of the neighbors trees looked like it was leaning. About 3o minutes later the neighbor knocks on our door and says he heard cracking coming from that tree and we probably should clear off our deck because the tree will most likely take it out. I just sat down and laughed because as most of you know, if it can wrong right now, it will. We've had so many unexpected expenses since Mike lost his job that it isn't even funny, but we will survive.

Our neighbor was not here for the ice storm last year so he has no idea how irry it is to hear all of the trees falling. His new wife was able to experience it though - part of her roof was damaged due to a tree falling on it. As I sit here and write, I can hear branches falling. There have been about 3 very large chunks of trees fall off since I got home, many small branches, and there are several split ones just waiting to fall. Mike laughs because every large crash I hear, I run outside to see what else fell. Our neighbor was outside on the last one too because it sounded really bad - he wanted to make sure our house wasn't hit. So far, we are fine, but I'm sure it will be a long night of crashes - hopefully none directly at our house.