Trick or Treat

We got 3 or 4 inches of heavy wet snow Saturday night. It did a lot of damage because the trees hadn’t yet gotten ready for winter. The oaks in particular were hit pretty badly because they haven’t dropped their leaves yet. There were a lot of major limbs and powerlines down all over our hill.

Luckily Sunday was a beautiful sunny day. So everyone in the neighborhood was out with tools helping each other clean up the damage. Well not everyone. In the middle of this, one neighbor came out and lectured us on how we were going to be liable for any damage if a small, broken branch on one of our trees dropped on her lawn. A particularly nice touch was that she dragged her young daughter along to give her an early lesson in how one speaks to the hoi polloi.

As you can imagine, after she went back inside, we had no problem figuring out where to slot her concerns into the day’s priority list. So we all got back to work cleaning up the other neighbor’s lawn. My chainsaw got a real workout cutting the big limbs down to manageable sizes so the boys could collect them into piles, but we finally got through it all before the sun went down.

One of the neighbors has a gas stove which works when the power’s out, so we warmed up a big pot of yummy left-over home made fish chowder. After supper we hollowed out a bunch of pumpkins and settled in for a big game of Settlers of Catan by candlelight. Even a bit of poor loserism couldn’t take the shine off of Peter’s amazing come from behind victory on development cards. After that we all crawled under our quilts with flashlights and books.

Hopefully we’ll have the power back on before the ghosts & ghouls show up tonight.