Had a bit of a storm

Well, I won't need to water the garden tonight.  We had a very fast, quite violent rain and wind storm come through a couple hours ago.

Here's a couple shots of the cloud wall as it approached us:

About 10 minutes after I took those, it got dark as night and the wind started blowing hard enough to make our 60 year old maple trees bend about 1/3 over, and our fruit trees were pretty much bent in half.  Luckily none of our trees lost more than some dead wood.  I'd hate to have to replace fruit trees now that ours are producing, and a big maple does nothing but break things when it falls.

Our neighbors weren't quite so lucky:

That's an 80 to 100 foot tall pine tree with a base of between 3 and 4 feet.  It missed the power lines by a few feet, which is lucky for us.  I checked out the part that broke, and it wasn't rotten at all.  The tree just gave out under the wind.

After the storm passed, I went down the road to the grocery to pick up some little things we need for breakfast tomorrow, and the stop lights along the main street were out until I was well into town.  For the most part people were doing the right thing and treating it as a four way stop, but there was at least one accident bad enough that they had to call a wrecker to haul off the carcass of a Toyota.  There were several large trees down in the park behind the house, but no other damage.

I'll have to do a couple minor repairs tomorrow on the rain gutter, but other than that it's just picking up some pieces of kindling in the back yard.  Guess we got lucky.