Since the weather has been uncommonly nice and I have been working away in my garden, I took yesterday as a respite. We were expecting Irene overnight, but it started to rain a little after 11:00 in the morning and rained steadily all day.
Lee Highway near the Cherrydale Safeway 11:00 am Saturday
I had laid in a store of books and pretty much settled myself in with them. Around 6:00 in the evening, the wind started to pick up, but it was only after I went to bed that things got wild. I woke up a couple times to howls and screeches, but the electricity was still on and nothing had fallen on my building, thank goodness.
It seems we fared pretty well. I called friends early to see if they were okay, then looked around my own neighborhood. There were twigs and a few small limbs down. The only serious thing was a tree from property we don’t own that fell into a neighbor’s kitchen window.
There are probably other threes ready to come down in this area to the left.
Ironically, the owners of this property have been committing mass arbicide on healthy trees in the past week, but haven’t done anything about this fenced off area that serves as drainage to a local feeder stream to the Potomac. My complex has been asking them to take care of this for years without success. The only good thing about this area is that it’s full of blackberries. Usually the birds beat me to them, but once in a while I get some nice ones.
Looks like we’re in for good weather the rest of the week, so the 14,000 people without power in Arlington won’t be baking or freezing—and will have power restored quickly with any luck. I hope it goes as well for people up the coast. Just since I started preparing the blog, the sun has come out. Whew!
This little guy was breakfasting on recently sprouted fungi.
arlingwords 