It was a dark and stormy night...

About midnight last night, I was awakened by strong winds outside. There was lighting and thunder, but the noise of the wind was what woke me. I unplugged my computer and woke Tom to see if he wanted his stuff unplugged. The storm lasted about an hour and a half, and the cats were rather agitated by it. Sundance kept walking across me and waking me up, and at one point she or Cassidy brought in a mouse and dumped it on the floor in my bedroom.

When Tom went out to survey the landscape this morning, there were some dead twigs and things down, and a sizable branch down over at Rich and Peggy's. He didn't think we had lost anything significant. On my way to church, I saw a few more larger limbs down on the side of the road, but not much else. At Mass I sat beside some young people from Poland. In fact, I think the only word they knew in English was "Poland", but they had friendly smiles.

This afternoon I was talking on the phone with my friend Steve Comeau and saw what looked like a downed tree right in the front of the house. After I got off the phone, Tom and I checked, and sure enough, another big poplar had broken off and come down, almost exactly where the one hit by lightning exploded last year. This was no lightning strike, just a weak trunk breaking in the wind, about ten feet or so off the ground.