On Irene, Unwelcome Guest:

The flooding rain wasn’t bad enough. The high winds took an additional toll. The storm damage came further inland than first thought.

First, I am thankful that we are safe and unharmed. (At last count forty dead and countless injured.)

Second, We now have electricity after over a day and a half of none. And the phone is back now too. (Many others will have no electric for days to come. And then there are the ones who lost their homes.)

Third, Not one of all the trees that came down hit our house or car.

Fourth, the large pumpkins themselves are undamaged, but they will not be growing any further as their vines and leaves have been.

As to the over all damage:

We lost most of the garden. The corn is flat, the tomatoes all dropped from the plants. More than half of the apples and pears have dropped from the trees. A lot of the leaves left on the plants still alive, like the lettuce, have been shredded.















One of the two flattened corn crops.















Some of the many tomatoes we picked up off of the ground.

Most of the food that was in the refrigerator needed to be thrown out. In our 20+ cubic foot chest freezer, the top third of all in it started to thaw out. And some of that completely thawed.

It took almost two days for the birds to come back, but the amount of dead ones found after it was all over was a bit unsettling. (Broken necks, wings or both.) There were also an amount of drowned rodents. Pockets of the smell of death hang about in spots in the woods presumably drowned in their dens underground.

The house lost some shingles from the roof. The wind driven rain came in, under and around through the cracks around the windows and doors. The gutters and down spouts will have to be re-hung.

We are spending every moment we can processing and canning as much of the garden goods as possible to recoup what we can.

After that we have a lot of outside clean up to do.

On Ready for Irene:

Ditches are dug, hatches are battened. Water is jugged, batteries are fresh, knitting is on standby, jigsaw puzzles are waiting to be pieced together.

We are ready for a blow!

Mountain Man stopped at a yard sale yesterday and got me a multi puzzle box. Eleven jigsaw puzzles; 2-1000 piece, 3-750 piece, and 6-500 piece of scenes from around the world.

All but one of the puzzle packets have never been opened, so I won’t have to guess about missing pieces as I make my way through the box.

I hope that all in the way of this storm are safe and healthy and stay so until all is over and all are back home and on line once again.

On Pumpkin Head Moments:

Really a Grandma moment, but I digress.

I have here a picture of one of our three large pumpkins. The wall is about hip high on me. So the pumpkin is about knee high.

And the pumpkin has grown since I took this picture a few weeks ago.

It was decided back in the Spring that we would try to grow a pumpkin large enough for the grandkid to fit into by his first birthday.

Now the grandkid will be a year old in October.

The trick will be to keep the pumpkin alive and growing through the expected storm, so that when the grandkid comes to visit around about his birthday, we can carve it out and sit him inside.

I now have the need to knit pumpkin hats for all involved.

Where did I stash my orange yarn?

On Blustery Play Day:

So yesterdays east coast earth quake came and went with little damage, and none to human life, it did shake up a lot of folk.

Now we are looking Hurricane Irene in the face. The air is wild and brisk today. Not cold exactly, but fresh and cool.

I love wild blustery windy days. The kind of wind that comes and goes in all directions seemingly at once. The wind turns the leaves on the trees upside down with a steady hiss as the leaves brush against each other.

These winds are not kind to bumbershoots (Umbrellas or parasols.) or lacey fairy wings and tend to tangle your long skirts and petticoats around your legs. Lifting leaves or papers and things off the ground and throw them about. But still I love them.

They stir me up and give me energy. I want to break out in a run and make loud noises. I feel like I’m chasing and being chased all at once.

I don’t expect to see fairies or even small animals in the woods on days like this. Whorl winds of debris dance about and die in clearings. As children we would chase them, trying to jump into the center and fly away. They were never strong enough for that, but we were children and endlessly hopeful.

When we were older children we thought about gliders and other Icarus type contraptions on blustery days. Running and jumping into the wind with large pieces of cardboard in tow were the game then.

Winds like this are usually followed by rain and lots of it. And tomorrow that is the forecast.

Today it is just such a blustery day. I should be hanging laundry on the clothes line and airing out things for the winter months catching this fresh smell for those months to come. But all I want to do is to take a bed sheet by the corners, go outside and play with the wind.

On Shake Me:

Well, I was going to talk about something else, but I’ll leave that for another day.

The news, ‘small’ as it is, is that we had an earth quake.

Mind you it was some three hundred plus miles away. We felt it here in Northeaster Pennsylvania. (5.9 in Mineral, Virginia.)

I was playing a video game on the computer this afternoon. The house started to shake and my computer screen started to sway. The roof was making odd creaking noises and I felt like I was swaying in my chair. There are now cracks in the ceiling plaster of my house.

The thing about my area of the USA is that a lot of it has old coal mines under it. They evacuated all tall and older buildings and told us all to look out for sink holes and mine subsidence in the hours and days to come. Thankfully no mines are directly under our house.

And there are also nuclear power plants that shut down because of it. Checked out, and restarted.

Also we have more bridges in Pennsylvania than any other state, and they all have to be checked for cracks or failings. I can’t get off my mountain without crossing a half a dozen bridges in any direction.

We will have to monitor the water from our well for a few days also.

The funny thing is that my family members who live closer to the quake center felt it less than we did.

We are fine here. Mountain Man’s stone walls didn’t move fraction of an inch. And no brick-a-brack was lost in the shaking. So all in all a fun time was had by all. Shank me again right down to my big black boots.

On Hopes that Come With Autumn:

As a school aged child the coming of Autumn has always brought a feeling of anticipation for me.

Not just the new school year, learning new things, new cloths, new books, new classes. This was the anticipation of new classmates.

Almost every year brought new families into town. New kids would arrive on the first day of school.

And I always harbored the hope that one day, one of them would be like me, be ‘my’ friend, like me for who I was.

There were times that things looked almost like they might fall into place. But alas it was not to be. The new kid would only humor me until they figured out the lay of the land. Than they would play up to the popular group in hopes of gaining higher status.

I was always left alone, friendless again by Thanksgiving time in late November.

Despite the yearly let down, I never lost that hope. Some day, a friend would come into my circle and like me for who I was, and not for what they could gain from association with me. Jobs held that same allure of possible friendships.

My divorce had its added blow of learning that not one of my so called friends wanted to keep that friendship. And I was told outright that the only reason I was tolerated was because of my husbands standing in the community.

I did find Mountain Man and though he is not a kindred spirit, he does tolerate it well for the most part.

All that aside, I find myself looking out the window these days and hoping for a kindred friend to come my way. Just because Autumn is coming.

On A New Story:

Hi everyone. I have posted a new story called "The Redneck's Car" on my Thrill or Shiver story blog page.

Let me know if you liked it. Or even if it needs something. I'm open to learning how to make my stories better.