Boxing Day storm

Awful uproar in the early morning, when it was still dark. I first got up at 5:45AM, when I heard the wind howling and trees heavily scraping the roof and walls. I continued sleeping. At 7:05AM I heard a vociferous crack, which was followed by a massive thump. I didn't have an idea what it could be at that time, but I decided to properly wake up then. An hour later it had bleached enough for us to see what was going on and this image shows just a part of the destruction the storm had caused.

However, I'm happy that spruce crashed exactly where it crashed: no building, car nor other thing got smashed by a 1700 kg tree. As we had surmised earlier, the spruce was slightly rotten, so no wonder it decided to kick the bucket, as the average wind velocity today was 28 m/s and the top 35 m/s. (Roofs can rip off at 20 m/s.) In the lower right corner of the image you can see the side mirror of my car, which I had just drove off the thicket of spruce branches; it was parked just some centimetres away from the cracked tree, so I think myself quite lucky for not having a crunched car now.

We were out of electricity for about 13 hours, as we lost the power at 6AM or so, and got it back at 7PM. Well, it was a bit different Boxing Day than we've normally used to have, I'd say. We spend the time clearing the yard and nearby roads of cracked trees, branches and random junk. Unca had been wading round our road in the morning sawing the big cracked trees, so there wasn't really much stuff around when I went for a walk.

Unluckily, I had to adjourn vacuuming and writing native essays I had planned to do today, but I can do them tomorrow if the circumstances just grant me. As you can see from this image, it's not very wintry here, but at least I'm having the winning face for the sake of the perfect crashing direction the spruce had chosen.

It was a bit slow to write this, because the electricity network here isn't very sure yet if it wants to provide us energy or not. Candles have come in handy today, really.