Storm Damage: or, The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

The good news is, Newton Avenue is under contract, closing date 8/15, contingent on an inspection. That's a huge relief. But sadly, that's the end of the good news for now. Anticipating the sale, we asked Frontier eight days ago to transfer our 8912 phone number from down there up here to the lake. Oh sure, we can do that, yup yup yup! Except they couldn't. As of today, after a series of repeated calls from me in increasing frustration and stupid errors and idiotic failures and miscommunications on the part of four or five separate Frontier employees, BOTH of our old phone numbers (8912 and 2723) have been disconnected and are irretrievably gone. We never told them to do that. They did it to us, without our consent, and they say that nothing can be done about it. Frankly they don't care much and they act as if it's our fault.  The supervisor who was supposed to call me this afternoon to discuss it didn't, of course. And they wouldn't tell me his last name or phone number, so I can't call him.  We have a new landline phone number now, that we didn't want, but we seem to be stuck with. We'll email it to you.

We were just beginning to calm down from that, late this afternoon, when a storm blew in. It was the second or third storm of the day with wild winds blowing across the lake straight at us. I looked out the window just in time to see all the lawn furniture fly into the air and the two big trees by the water almost blow down. Fortunately, they didn't.  Here's what it looked like afterwards:

The screen house is totaled, and in the trash now.

 This is the pole that holds up the roof over our bed in the popup. The wind bent it out of shape so the roof sagged down. There's a small hole in the canvas above it and water poured in on the bed and couch cushion. Also, the pole UNDER the bed that holds it in place from the outside was knocked out of place and driven into the ground.

This is the slideout with the dinette table and chairs. As you can see, the wind pushed the whole thing into the main body of the popup about a foot. I can't even imagine what wind speed it must have taken to push that thing in. It's very heavy.

The sagging roof over our bed from outside. Dad bent the pole more or less back into shape and we'll see about patching the hole and replacing it. You can see the support pole driven into the ground on the left.

More pix of the murdered screen house.

And worst of all, my mother's pretty wooden swing that we gave her for her 80th birthday. We don't understand how the wind blew it INTO the lake; it was blowing exactly the other way, across the water toward the house. Maybe it was a microburst blowing downward. You can also see a table and chair that got blown around the tree and halfway out into the lake.  We probably can't get the swing out of the lake without pulling it to pieces. That's probably the end of it. It was so pretty between the trees. I loved it.

Random lawn chairs and a ladder tossed around the yard.  Several pieces of furniture ended up in the lake. We fished most of them out, and very fortunately, none of them blew through any windows, but there's still a little glass table underwater in the lake that I'll rescue tomorrow with the kayak, and a missing metal chair that may be underwater someplace too. Or maybe it's in Kansas.

Taken right afterwards. At least the trees didn't come down.

Everything that really matters is fine. We are fine, the house is fine, the cars are fine. People's whole houses blow down in storms like this. That didn't happen. Really, we were lucky. But geez, what a crummy day.

Congratulations to our newest homeowners!

Fathers and grandfathers

Happy first Father's Day, Jason!

Evening

Some photos from Memorial Weekend, courtesy of Jason, Laura and Caleb

This isn't from Memorial Weekend - I stole it from Laura. But I didn't get many good pictures of Sam, and this one is so cute that I couldn't resist including it. 

Jamie the fisherman. He caught half a dozen crappies and perch.

Jason got two great videos. 

Two videos of the waterfall

Jason's, all green and dreamy and gentle, and a few days later, after more rain, Dad's.

And an update: Luke at the waterfall.