Sandy, Good Riddance!

As I am sure most of you know, roughly two weeks ago hurricane Sandy hit the east coast. We fared better than our neighbors but we were not without damage. We lost power for about a week and a half (hence the lack of blog posts...sorry folks). Thought I would make it up to all of you by showing you some of the pictures I took of the damage. First let me give you an idea of how windy it really was. This is a picture of a stick, about an inch in diameter, that is firmly wedged in the deck.

Luckily, those types of flying missiles missed the windows, but one or two did go straight through the tarp pool cover. The only real damaged we suffered was to the back fence when our neighbors trees fell and uprooted the fence. The pictures are more impressive than my explanation:

And from another angle:

In that last picture you can see the tree resting on the neighbors house. Here is a better shot:

They lost three trees, but the other two feel along the fence, so they did not cause any more damage to either their house or our fence:

They have had the trees cut and are still waiting on stump removal before we can really put the fence back together. No worries though, Lucy has no desire to go near that part of the fence. As I mentioned before we did a lot better than some of our neighbors. Here is a shot from the house in the back cul-de-sac:

The next street over (a grouping of small ranch style homes) was much harder hit than our section. I thought it rude to take a photo, but there was one home that had a large tree fall right down the center of it, essentially crushing the one story home. Luckily, the family was able to be evacuated even after the tree had fallen. 

All and in all we got really lucky. The property damage was not that bad, and frankly, the worst part was the loss of power. Even that had a silver lining, I got a surprise visit back to Pittsburgh (where we picked up a generator) and I was given a perfect chance to really clean out the fridge and freezer.