Robin in the rain, such a saucy fellow. Robin in the rain, mind your socks of yellow.
It was a beautiful rainy day and I was out sloshing around the neighborhood in ankle deep water with my buddy Ike. I had a big broken bumbershoot to shelter my little Flip video cam and I was filming sewer drains in action. [Update: Er, that would be *storm* sewer drains, thank you Jay!] No, I won’t bore you with those. Not today, anyway. So. I had walked in and out of the schoolyard several times, through the sprawling mudpuddles and past the entrance to the woods. I was heading home and it was raining really hard and the wind finally started to come up a little bit. As I was walking beside the woods, my Celtic sixth sense kicked into gear, and I thought to myself, “hmmm, maaaayyyybeee I should just *not* walk through the woods today.” I didn’t walk through the woods but it wasn’t due to my little prescient flash of insight. It was because the woods was basically a big mudpuddle and I was already sopping wet and the idea of going home, changing out of my wet clothing, washing the mud off of my feet and legs, and, oh, maybe pouring a wee bit of ‘hattan was too hard to resist.
Fastforward 15 minutes. I was hanging out reading the newspaper in my nice cozy ugly cluttered kitchen and Mouse and the GG were in the back room. The wind was coming up a little bit more and all of a sudden, CRASH! What was *that*? Actually, it wasn’t that loud. I wasn’t even sure I had heard a crash. It wasn’t inside the house and nothing was amiss in the yard. The GG was entranced with the wind, so he took off in the new vee-hickle and drove around looking for gloom and doom and devastation. Nobody bothered to look around any closer to home.
This morning, I took off on my walk and it was dark and I got to the schoolyard entrance by the woods and I was watching warily for skunks and there weren’t any skunks but there was a CROCODILE!!! Except (of course!) it wasn’t a crocodile. It was a great big tree that had fallen out of the woods, crashing over the fence in the process. It was right next to the entrance. The one that I had dithered around about entering yesterday afternoon.
Disclaimer: Here on the western quadrant of the Planet Ann Arbor, Ike brought a lot of rain, some lightning, and some wind. We have in NO WAY experienced anything approaching the devastation that Ike brought to the folks in Texas or even other areas of the upper midwest. My heart goes out to all of those who have lost homes or vee-hickles or other possessions. Or friends and family members. I have no words about that.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
OK, so this proves once and for all that if nobody is in the woods, a falling tree STILL makes a sound! (heh)
And….’hatten? Really? I LOVE those! :o)
September 16th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
OK – were you really filming SEWER drains in action, or were they STORM SEWER drains in action. Sanitary – Storm. They start with the same letter, but the action you would be fliming would be really different. I’m just saying if were really Sewer you might have had a lot more to say about them. Storm sewers are fascinating for entirely different reasons – usually having to do with flow patterns, etc…
I’m just saying – my ears/eyes perk up when somebody actually talks about my kind of stuff.
September 17th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Ike followed me from Laredo TX all the way to Buffalo NY. It wasn’t the rain, but the wind blowing the truck around. I saw a few trucks blown right off the road. Luckily, I had over 36,000 lbs. on, so I was ok, but it still blew me around. Dallas to Tennessee was all rain and wind, after that, more wind. Debri was on the highways everywhere. The lower half of Ohio was without electricity, and some parts of Pennsylvania as well, and that was near the end of the storm.
In New Baltimore, every time we get a good lightening storm, the trees in my neighbors back yard ALWAYS get hit behind my house. We hop the fence and collect the firewood. : D My kids informed me that my house was without electricity for a day and a half, because of Ike leftovers….
I went to Minnesota after that, and now I’m in Georgia, near Savannah. There is a fuel shortage out here already for the big trucks because of the storm. The truck stops south of Atlanta are all out, and jammed with trucks waiting. Good thing I fueled in Illinois.
I like what Tonya wrote….