Hi, finally checking in with everyone. We got our power back late Monday night. When my son and I saw the work crews scouting out our downed power lines, we jumped up and down in greeting. We did a happy dance. I drove into town and bought them donuts. These folks have worked their tushies off getting power back to people. We are grateful to them. We had many large branches down, and our yard was covered with smaller branches - a veritable green yard in December! But no damage and the greenhouse still stands! (That's the important thing, you know.). Our backyard neighbor got a fir tree through his roof, and the guy across the street lost a really big fir, but amazingly, it fell the only way it could have possibly fallen to avoid damaging anything at all. What luck! We have a lot of fir trees in our area and there are enough of them that they offer some protection to one another in general, but people do occasionally lose one. This one broke off in the middle of the trunk. Wierd.
Our back fence blew down so the dogs had a field day engaging the corgies who live behind us. You know, people who don't know 'dog' behavior should reconsider owning dogs. Our dogs bark at each other through the fence but we figured that if they ever actually got in contact with each other, there would be lots of posturing and barking and maybe a bit of 'rolling over' , but no damage. We have Australian shepherds, not exactly known for their fighting temperament, and the neighbor's corgies are also herding dogs, albeit a bit nastier of disposition (especially their dogs who are loathed by the entire neighborhood). Our two Aussies got into the neighbor's garage and one of the corgies was in there, so the barking and posturing commenced. I'm satisfied to stand back until the fray is over and let everyone work things out. The neighbor's 21 year old son, however, is evidently not a 'dog' person. He and the dad came running into the garage, knocking each other down trying to get through the door to their backyard in their haste to beat each other to the 'dog fight', and the son began to beat my dogs with his rake. When I yelled that they were all working it out and tried to point out that, while plenty noisy, no fur was flying and no blood was streaming, I thought he was going to turn the rake on me. He grabbed my big dog, who is 11 years old, and practically threw her back and then went for my smaller dog (who is our problem child, admittedly). He's lucky he did not get bitten by his own dog in the process. Talk about over reacting! I've never liked this kid one bit and my instincts were fully justified after seeing how he treated my dogs. If the rake had been sturdier than a leaf rake, he would have severely injured both of them. Our Aussies sulked home at my command, no worse for the wear, fortunately. We put up a temporary fence until the main fence is fixed. Don't want to take a chance on our dogs meeting again and maybe, gasp!, actually working it out in their dog way! They ought to take their dogs to the dog park for a little social interaction. Maybe they would learn something in the process.
Other than that incident, we just camped out at home. We have a wood insert in the fireplace in the family room and I slept in there one night because it was too cold in the rest of the house. We have lanterns, etc, for emergencies since the power goes out frequently around here. Just when we thought 'this is getting old', they fixed the power. Yea!
