We went to Missouri last weekend to meet our now two-week-old neice Sadie and visit 17-month-old Ethan, our sweet nephew. It was an awesome visit with the fam; everyone including my sister is doing really well.
But the trees there in Springfield, Missouri are not doing very well! They got an ice storm in mid-January, which is nothing new in Missouri (believe me -- I grew up there; winter = ice storms). What was new was that is was at least three inches of ice everywhere. In Colorado, we could probably weather that pretty well. But, with oak and maple trees galore that are hundreds of years old, that much ice didn't sit well in Missouri. We couldn't believe the damage. HUGE oak trees were just split in two from the weight of the ice on the branches. All of the trees' tops were broken and hanging down instead of reaching for the sky. My brother-in-law had cleaned up the downed branches from his six old oaks and had a pile of branches 10-12 feet by 8 feet wide and probably 10 feet tall -- and their damage was minimal. Check out these pictures from the Springfield paper documenting the storm and aftermath (click on the galleries under the "special coverage" section.
Also, because the cables there in Springfield are above-ground and also had so much weight on them, they're stretched out and draped lower to the ground. Just in the three days we were there, a utility truck went under a cable two streets over from my Grandma's place, accidentally caught the wires on the top of the truck and inadvertently yanked a bunch of them out of the main box, causing outage of power again in about 1/4 of the city. Funny that it was a utility truck ... too bad they didn't get it fixed for about 24 hours. Then, shortly after we heard Grandma's power was back up and running, we heard a truck drive by in front of Erin and John's and *boom* -- HGTV went fuzzy. The trucks going around picking up the branches had pulled the cable out of the cable box for Erin and John's house and it was just laying in a pile in front of their house. Lovely.
Anyway, all of this to say, "What a mess!" It's hard to describe or even understand in pictures, but it looks like a series of tornados ripped through town, and the aftermath is somewhat similar, too. Hopefully things will keep improving! More posts about the weekend in Missouri later. I had a fun time at the ghetto gym I've got to share. Later.
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Craziness! I have never understood how something like winter time which has happened every 8-9 months, once a year for time immemorial seems to give us so much trouble. It seems like around 44% of the population just pretends like it doesn’t matter and gets in trouble and another 44% acts like it’s the end of the world and buys every store out of every product. All I’m left with is 2% of the entire population who makes RATIONAL preparation based upon experience and realizes that 4-wheel drive doesn’t make you STOP any faster.
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