Irene

It's been busy around here with all the earthquakes and the Hurricane. Last weekend we had Hurricane Irene come through. A lot of the local forecasters were forecasting that it would stay well east of us or that the wind would not be significant. There was even a local NBC forecaster who was saying we wouldn't even get any rain. They were way off. If you were around for Isabelle it was pretty much the same thing. There was a lot of rain and a LOT of wind with gust over 70 mph. There were tons of trees down all over the Richmond area. We actually got it worse in Richmond than they did in the Virginia Beach area.
There are about 9 oak trees in our back yard and 4 of them are close to the house and HUGE. I didn't expect anything to happen to them because they are close to each other and I figured the roots probably are intertwined. There are some dead branches though on some of the other trees and I was actually hoping they would blow down. Well absolutely nothing blew down in our yard. Nothing but little twigs and leaves. I guess we were lucky because some of our neighbors had it much worse. One house had a tree fall right through the middle of it. Tabs Grandfather down the street from us had a big oak fall on his house. At least he had moved his cars because that tree fell right across his driveway where he normally parks before it hit his house. Across the street from us there was another big tree that fell right across the power line and kept us without power for 5 days.

 Probably not the smartest thing I've ever done but water was running into his house so I went over in the middle of the storm and helped cut the tree.

 this is were his cars normally are

 This guy made a bad decision. I went around another way to get home.

I had hoped to make a little extra money after the storm by cutting up trees but the neighbors had so many trees down that I have spent the last week cutting their trees and hauling the wood to our future home site. We should have enough firewood now to easily get us though next winter. I haven't has a wood stove since I lived in my parents house and I have no idea how much wood we will need but I am very confident we have enough. I took 4 loads down from the storm and I already had a huge pile from clearing for the food plot.  That's not counting all the trees I will go around and cut up this winter that are down on our property from the storm. Now I just need to build one of those awesome wood sheds like they have over at Against the Grain ( http://againstthegrainhomestead.blogspot.com/2011/06/okay-wind-is-in-my-favor-today.html )