{Friday Foto Friends} Winds, Sky, and a Recipe

Deb at Breathing in Grace hosts this linky most Fridays. I take it as an opportunity to let y'all know what's going on during the week in the Small Town.
Last Friday, I received a phone call from a tree service that I hired a month and a half ago. I almost called him on Thursday to ask if he was going to be able to trim our trees, because if he wasn't, we were going to have to pay someone else just a little more to get it done. We had a branch from the hickory tree outside of our living room window that was pushing against the window. The guy called on Friday and said that they were about 45 minutes from being finished with a job not far from me, so if I was going to be home, they would come by and clean the trees. I wasn't about to tell him 'no', so they came and conquered.
Trees being cleaned up in our yard.
It turned out to be an extremely good thing, because we had a horrendous storm on Saturday night. Big oak trees fell, and many fell on power lines and houses. I drove by my parents' house before Mass on Sunday, not expecting to see anything. I was in for a surprise:
Oak tree and landscaping fallen;
It reminded me of Wonder Works.
It was heartbreaking to see this tree on the ground. Daddy landscaped the area below it; he even won a beautification award for it & had an article in the newspaper. And, my brother spent a lot of time cleaning and weeding that area out the day before (I think it was). Luckily, it just missed the house. That is no exaggeration, either. 
None of us expected to spend our Memorial Day weekend cleaning up. A guy drove by on Sunday and asked if he could have the wood. He was told that if he sawed it, he could have it. He spent most of the day Sunday and Monday sawing and loading up the wood. As it turned out, he was the son of 1 (or more) of my sibling's classmates.  (Small town, remember?)
The great clean-up
Just to give an example of how close the tree came to the house:
The tree fell too close to the house for comfort.
And just how old the tree was:
The many rings on the tree
So, how did the landscaping and trunk get turned over?  Funny you should ask! CH got to play with his winch. It actually came in pretty handy to have a redneck for a husband! 😉
Our house was fine; we were only without power until Sunday around 2:00. I wasn't going to complain about not having internet knowing people were without power! The good thing was that it wasn't humid, or very hot over the weekend. 
The top of a tree fell on a power line just behind us & took out the power box.
CH had another chance to use his winch to pull down our next-door-neighbor's top of a tree that was stuck.
I shot these pictures one evening as I sat on the couch. These pictures all have the same settings. Every time I sat down and looked out, the colors changed.
It was amazing to see how the sky changed. The settings were not changed for each picture.
I tried a new recipe: Steak Burrito Bowl from Six Sisters' Stuff. This is definitely a keeper! This is one of the few times CH and YS have had no suggestions of add-ins or changes to make a dish taste better. YS did the staging for me.
Steak Burrito Bowl from Six Sisters' Stuff
A bottled Sangria paired very well with it!
After 5 years, the radio in my car was having issues. First it was the bluetooth. Kia said that there was an update that messed it up with Androids. Great. It wasn't under warranty any longer, and it was suggested that another radio (not a stock radio) would be less expensive than if the dealership put one in. Lately, my radio was just resetting by itself. Yeah, it was pretty aggravating! At CH's suggestion, I went to the place that he's used a couple of times and he hooked me up with a new radio.
New radio!
You don't realize how much you appreciate bluetooth until you don't have it. Not having a hands-free radio was not fun. AND, I got 3 free months of SiriusXM, which I had canceled a couple of months ago.
And...that's it. Finally! It's been a busy week, and next week is going to be just as busy, if not busier. I'm going to try to rest up this weekend and hopefully get a 2nd wind!

9 comments:

  1. Your photos are fantastic! That large tree with its many rings reminded me of an old--and huge--copper beech on the motherhouse grounds. It was special to us--we sat under it and had picnics on special gatherings here and one of our sisters many years ago wrote a beautiful reflective poem about it. Not too many years ago it had to taken down because of some disease. We stood at the windows on our fifth floor to watch the ways in which the company took the huge branches down. They estimated it was more than a hundred years old. Today one of our meeting rooms is the Copper Beech Room.

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  2. We've had a few storms like that come through our area, they have been quick, very strong and did a lot of damage. Love the pictures of that beautiful sky, God's artwork for sure.

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  3. Doesn't it make you feel great when you get those things done before the bad storm? Im sorry your dad lost his special reee though. Your sunset pics look very much like mine. Where is your small town anyway?

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  4. Wow! So glad that tree missed your folks' house! Loved the videos and the photos are pretty amazing - especially that changing sky. Hope you get that much needed rest!!

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  5. It was fun seeing the winch in action. Its wonderful that someone came along to cart off that big tree for fire wood!
    It has been stormy here on the Jersey coast with lots of coastal flooding. I worry because I have a number of trees that need to come down. Just too expensive right now.
    Have a lovely weekend

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  6. So glad you didn't have any damage from the storm at your house. We weren't without power, either, it just flickered. We did have a lot of leaves, sticks and limbs to clean up and our Internet was out for a couple of days...which turned out to be a blessing! ;-) Thanks so much for linking up today. HOPE you have a great weekend.

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  7. That tree though! Wow! It was huge!! I am so glad things turned out okay with it not hitting the house! Happy Summer Break to us!!

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  8. So glad the trees did not hit yours or your parents' homes. We just had 1 tree and 3 humongous bushes taken down this week. So I understand how you feel getting that work done.

    What a gorgeous sunset!!

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  9. Thank you for this interesting blog!

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