we weren’t in the woods, and it definitely made a sound

so, a few wednesdays back i woke up to a loud boom…

…i paused the rain noise generator we use, listened for a second, heard more thunder up close, and said to myself, “oh, we have a storm”, and started the rain noise back up before doing what anyone does when they’re woke up by weather at an obscenely early hour on your day off – you get up, you pee, you take a couple hits off a weed vape, and you pass back out.

when i got up about 9am i took a shower, put the laundry away, and walked out of our room, greeting the puppies on the way down the hall. at the end nik was waiting, and before there was “good morning”, or “i love you”, there was “we’ve taken on some damage…you should look out the carport door”

that was the view – the business end of a large branch pointing to us courtesy of…

that looks pretty big, and while i’m a bit smaller than i used to be, here’s some size perspective…

and it only got bigger from there – some perspective on the tree as compared to our dwelling…

so, needless to say, my day off was spent with our insurance agent. calls were made. panic was induced when i realized they had doubled our deductible without telling me. an appointment was set a week out (a note to all austin readers, this storm hit me approximately twelve hours prior to the big cell that slapped austin out of nowhere), which i mention because i’ve been told quite a few of them are still waiting for someone to come look at what happened. speaking of “what happened”, here’s where that noise came from…

but, i’m trying to look at the positive. due to hail damage from a previous storm we were encouraged to file a SECOND claim because deductibles were half what they are now back when that happened, meaning we can replace the whole roof and “reset the lifespan” of all materials a lot cheaper due to the lower deductible. before that happens, obviously some structural stuff must be done, and for that we’re utilizing todd krause, contractor, master carpenter, and my childhood bff whom i haven’t seen in over thirty years.

this is an interesting circle of life moments because, after seeing urban cowboy at the baker theater as kids, we decided to use a green net hammock i had like a mechanical bull whereby one of us would get in it and then the other would try to shake and rock the hammock to drop the other one of us on the ground. lots of fun, bit of pain, as it goes when you’re a younger lad.

as we all know, hammock’s are held up by TWO trees…well, twenty three years ago one of the hammock trees fell on the same side of the house, but really gently causing zero damage. this time was different, as the pic above hints at. insurance lady came out (happy early birfmas, miss tamara) and funds (part i) were secured, so i called my new found tree guy, and within half an hour we had three guys with three chainsaws chop ‘n drop that sucker in three hours, so we could see how real the damage was…

so, we’ll see where this takes us from there…