Thursday, August 27, 2009

Oh, hail no...or reasons to not blog...

I had good intentions - I had taken pics of lots of the projects that we are working on, even sized them and just needed to load 'em up - but Mother Nature has her own plans sometimes! Plans in the form of a rip-roaring hail storm, complete with 90+ mph winds and microbursts that beat the bajeezus out of everything around here. We were blissfully up at Golden Gate Canyon camping - even watched a beautiful sheet lightning storm around the campfire, entirely unaware that the beautiful lightning we were watching from afar was the herald of serious nastiness back home.

Our street
The front driveway - yes, there really is asphalt under there somewhere - it was buried in a 4 inch thick layer of pine needles, pine cones and leaves.
The culprits - or what remained of them.


The garden - we ended up being glad that we only had 4 tomato plants, a few cucumber vines and a basil plant in the ground this year - they were all stripped down to a bare twig.
Dining room window glass and leaves smashed against the side - can you see the dimples in the downspout? Our siding, gutters and spouts look like someone with a ball peen hammer and a vendetta went at them.One of the hall way windows - the hail went through four layers of glass here and hit hard enough to embed pieces in the wooden door across the hallway - maybe we are glad we weren't home after all!

Needless to say, this put a bit of a damper onto projects this past month - we had just had the roof re-done in January - one of the few projects that we didn't do ourselves - including 5" gutters to deal with the leaves from all the big, beautiful and now bare trees around here. On the bright side, raking this fall should be a whole lot easier...

All in all - 22 panes of glass to replace, roof, gutters, siding on two sides of the house, and a whole slew of other incidentals that keep cropping up as we find them (oh, you mean that wasn't a soaker hose before???? But it spews water so nicely...) *sigh*

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