It's been a long week

Well the insurance adjuster is here, one week after the big wind storm. The electric company has been able to restore power to all but about 90,000 homes. At the height of the outage it was over 350,000 homes and businesses. We never lost power, we had some big surges that fried some of the emergency back up power supplies that we have our electronics plugged into and the TV fried (sort of). Our overhead garage door on our detached garage blew in, it was hit by some flying debris and so our garage has been open to the world.

But we have been incredibly lucky. The weather has held except for one brief flurry of rain, so our missing shingles were not a huge problem and the garage was covered in a tarp but was certainly not burglar proof, but no one touched anything. All in all we got off Scot free. We were especially blessed to have power as mu husband runs his business from a home office and all of his work is done on computers and servers sited right here. If we were one of the 90,000, things would not be looking very good from a financial perspective.

Right now the adjuster and my husband are walking all over the roof above my head, trying to get access to the upper roof. Of course, the shingles could not have blown off the easily accessible roof!! No, they blew off the roof that is 3 stories off the ground and steeply pitched.

I have spent the week helping folks with refrigerator clean out and accessing resources to replace food. We have also been pitching in as a neighborhood to help each homeowner clear their yard of debris. The city finally came and took the two huge trees out of the street, but the lower half of the block still does not have power.

My laundry machines have been running non-stop helping others keep ahead of their wash. And we have had several multi family dinners trying to use up food before it spoiled or just to feed those who lost all of their food.

Its been a tough week, but one full of grace and the spirit of togetherness. I just hope things get back to normal soon. They are threatening to open all the schools tomorrow which is not the best news for the kiddos, but my high schooler is ready to go back. I have been back at work since Tuesday so that part is not a big deal.

My tomatoes have enjoyed this long dry warm spell and have just been producing like crazy. I give them away and give them away, I make sauce and can them and they still keep coming. I think I wont plant as many actual plants next year, although I only planted 6. The pumpkins are orange and the stems are drying. Soon it will be time to put in the bulbs for the Spring in the front garden and put my vegetable garden to rest.