Slice of Heaven

Irene and other stories

I realize that I have been very absent from the blogosphere lately-life otherwise seems to have consumed us, but in good ways.

This, our generator, kept us operating at home for 5 days without power during and after Hurricane Irene. We did not have significant damage, but did have numerous trees down.

Notice the nice little shed Dennis built to keep the generator in. It doesn't look quite as nice now-on the first day he ran the generator, it vibrated itself too close to the shed and the exhaust caught the shed on fire! Thankfully, my mom's keen eyes spotted smoke and the fire was quickly extinguished, but the shed now has a nice large black hole! Lesson learned: secure the generator during use so it doesn't move around!

Our very large Bradford Pear tree with the nice cedar bench around it did not make it through the storm. I'm sure the bench will be rebuilt at some point.

I rescued our sunflower heads from the garden before the storm, and gathered all of the seeds out of them. In order to save the seeds for bird food, I roasted them in the oven at a low temperature. I'm sure the birds will enjoy the black oil sunflower seeds this winter!

Our basement suffered a bit of water seepage...Eric's room got the worst of it, and so the carpet had to be pulled and dried. Nothing a bit of steam cleaning and lots of fans couldn't take care of!

After Hurricane Irene was gone, we had a brief respite from the rain to celebrate Dennis' birthday. This year, the Blue Angels came and we went out for a sail on the grandparent's boat to watch. We all agree that watching from the boat is the way to watch the Blue's!

Our Labor Day Weekend was scheduled to end with our annual camping trip to Ohiopyle. Unfortuantely, rain was in the forecast for the entire week. Undaunted, we decided to go anyways, hoping for the best. We arrived, set up in the rain, spent the night listening to pouring rain, woke up to rain and read forecasts calling for 100 percent chance of rain all week as well as flood warnings. Both us and the family with us decided it was not a good use of vacation time, so we wimped out, packed up, and left.

It turned out to be a good decision-there was heavy flooding in the area, as well as the danger of trees falling within the campground-so we are sorry we missed our big trip this year, but glad of our decision.