Note: the events taking place in this post occurred between the overnight hours of Friday, July 9 and the evening of Sunday, July 11, 2021. This is being separated and written as its own post because it is far too long of a story to tell in the normal daily updates of the Isolation Diaries series. To understand the events of July's upcoming post more fully, this story serves as a...prerequisite, of sorts. Let's begin.
Look, I've always enjoyed thunderstorms.
As a kid, I always got excited for stormy weather because I loved watching rain, loved watching the lightning and hearing the thunder boom through my chest like the drums of a marching band. Growing up in the West Virginia hills in the 80s and 90s, I saw some amazing storms. I saw storms where it rained sideways, storms with thunder so loud it made your ears pop, storms with lightning so close that you could smell the static charge in the air afterwards. In 1993, I watched lightning shear my grandmother's 100+ year old sugar maple tree in half during a storm, a tree that was about 100 yards from the house.
It's a lot less awesome when something like that affects you personally.
On this past Friday night, Daisy and I went to Trader Joe's to get some last minute groceries and the like for the trip to South Dakota. I remember saying to her "hm, maybe we will get some storms tonight after all," as we drove west and I looked at a dark sky full of clouds. They didn't look ominous or horrifying, just dark clouds far off to the west -- indicating that rain or storms would be here eventually, maybe, if they didn't move off in another direction or dissipate before they arrived.
The cashier in Trader Joe's mentioned something about storms coming too.
"Oh, so are we actually supposed to get them now?" I asked. "I saw they canceled the 'first alert day' thing on channel 6 for today."
"Supposedly," she said. "I heard people talking about them earlier."
We went home, I continued packing for the trip, we took care of some around the house stuff, and I fell asleep in my chair for a short while.
Around 11pm, Daisy made dinner and we ate, late, talking about all the stuff we had to do over the weekend and making a checklist for all of it. We were half-assedly watching an episode of Deep Space Nine when I decided to just be done for the night, turn off the TV, and go upstairs. This was roughly around midnight or so.
And that's when we heard it.
"Is that wind?" I asked.
And then we heard tree branches cracking and falling to the ground with sickening thuds.
I ran to the front window to see all hell breaking loose outside, out of nowhere -- several large branches down in our yard from one of our maple trees out front, wind blowing detached branches from other trees through the air, through the neighborhood, tornado-style, and heavy rain, bright lightning, and thunder. The wind was unreal.
"Get your phone and pull up the radar, figure out what's going on," I said to Daisy.
The internet went down almost immediately. Our power kept flickering strongly, would go off for half a second or two or three seconds, and then kick back on normally. I stood at the window and watched the chaos, and watched as another, larger branch came down right in front of our sidewalk -- missing the house by maybe six feet. Daisy stood back into the room and begged me to get away from the windows.
"If I'm not here, I can't see what the hell is going on," I said.
All of this happened in the span of maybe 90 seconds.
I need to stress that for emphasis -- ninety seconds. Ninety seconds from absolutely nothing going on outside and us getting ready to go to bed, to massive tree branches down in our front yard and some of the worst storm conditions I've ever seen.
"Check to see if this is a tornado or some other shit, [Daisy]," I said, as she scrambled to find out what was going on on her phone in a panic.
When she finally pulled it up, we found that it was a big line of really nasty storms that had formed very, very slightly to the northwest of us and were very slowly rolling through the area. We were under multiple severe thunderstorm warnings...which we wouldn't know as the internet had gone down (Alexa is set to tell us when there's severe weather alerts in the area, for any reason).
So, great, thunderstorms. Big ones, out of the blue, that we'd never gotten any warning for and had appeared to just materialize out of thin air right above our goddamn house. But, nothing tornadic.
I went upstairs to turn off my computer (to make sure it stayed off) and other electronics, because the power had been bouncing and I didn't want them to be damaged by surges or anything like that. While I was up there, I got the (unfortunately-timed) urge/need to take a massive shit.
Look, I'm not proud of it, but when you need to poop, you need to poop. And it wasn't something that could just be "put off," I had to do it then and there. I told Daisy this and sat down to unleash the fury. I was halfway done when -- again, adding insult to injury -- the tornado siren started going off.
"That's the tornado siren," I said, yelling downstairs to Daisy.
"I am aware," she replied.
"...figure out what is going on, I am shitting and I cannot help you!"
I waited about two minutes until I was done and heard nothing else out of the wife.
"[Daisy]," I yelled downstairs again, as the power kept flickering but never went out, "Quit fucking around on your phone trying to find shit out and turn on the television."
I love my wife. She's one of the smartest people I've ever met and one of the kindest, most loving souls on the planet -- but in a crisis or when she is super-stressed and panicky, even she would fully admit to you that her panic consumes her and that she can't think straight or figure out logical solutions. In her panic, she later admitted that she forgot that the internet doesn't run the TV, and that she could've had it on the entire time.
I heard people talking on the TV and ran back down a few minutes later to assess the situation further. The storm was bad -- there were 130,000 people in Omaha alone without power, and the tornado siren (which had since kicked back off) had been triggered because of 75-to-95 (yes, ninety-five) mile-per-hour wind gusts and straight-line winds in the area. We were not out of it yet either; the weather people on the local channels said it would continue to move through the area for the next hour or two.
It was at about this time when we legit felt a particularly hard wind hit and shake the house, and heard a really loud crack and pop outside, as well as a hard scrape and a resounding, ground-thump of a sickening thud. It was so loud and so hard that we legitimately thought it was the rest of our tree coming down on the house or on the street.
I again ran to the window (against Daisy's wishes, of course) and was very reassured to see our trees still standing, and no real further damage I could see from my vantage point. We knew it had been a big chunk of the tree that came down, but didn't know where or how big. Of course, by this point it's after 1am, it's raining like fuck with thunder and lightning still everywhere, and because of that it's dark as fuck too.
So let's step back for a minute -- both Daisy and I are shaking from anxiety and fear, from what we can see there's a LOT of branches down, big ones, in our yard and neighborhood, the storm is howling and raging (without any real reprieve) and we don't know how much of our trees are left or if part of one has landed on the house and caused roof or siding damage or what. And, adding further insult to injury, the internet is hard down and this happens four days before we leave for vacation to South Dakota.
As an aside, I told Daisy that apparently South Dakota is bad fucking luck for us -- a few days before our last trip out there in 2019 -- if you've been reading my stuff for a while -- you'll recall that the retaining wall in our backyard collapsed in a wind/hailstorm then. That was $10k to repair/rebuild. This year, when we're returning to literally the exact same areas of South Dakota, this storm hits and causes all the damage it has. But we'll get to that.
Remarkably, once the wind died down and the storm moved off, even in the middle of the night, we ventured outside as far as we could go in the dark to assess the damage. It turns out, that wasn't very far. The front door had been blocked off with medium to large branches, the tips of them resting against our storm door, which was unfortunate because it was the only place outside we have a light worth a fuck. I could see from the porch and from the front window that there were a lot of large branches down, but the trees were still there and appeared to be okay. There were some other branches from neighbors' trees down in the yards of our street, but (of course) the worst tree damage that we could see looked to be centralized to our yard and our trees. I must stress that, again, it was the middle of the night and therefore very dark, so we couldn't see much of anything. Coming back inside from the front porch, I slipped on the floor (as the particular pair of sandals I was wearing have no traction on the bottom) and I came down hard on my left knee -- putting me into blinding pain for a good five minutes, as my knees already suck anyway. I'm fine, it just sucked.
We went out the back door onto our porch and over to the side, where our gate is and the "alleyway" of sorts is between our house and our neighbor's house, and opened the gate to see ...well...nothing but tree. The entire space between our house and our neighbor's house was filled with downed tree branches. In the dark, with what limited visibility we had, it looked like an entire tree. We knew it wasn't, because our trees were still standing, but I can't describe to you how large of a space was filled with literally nothing but tree.
As the storm had moved off by around 1:30 or so and the local channels had stopped their coverage of it, we turned off the TV -- again, both of us massive balls of stress and frustration at this time -- and migrated upstairs to bed.
"We can't do anything about it tonight," Daisy told me, "so we may as well just go to bed and get some sleep."
I didn't want to sleep; it was Friday, I'd slept all day, and I'd dozed off in the evening in my chair for a bit. I was frazzled and stressed and the very last thing I wanted to do at all was sleep. But, the internet was down (I'd already called it in, apparently we were part of a larger outage -- who knew, right?) and the television wasn't going to give me any more info that I didn't already know, so to calm my nerves and get my mind off everything, I sat down at my computer, fired up a podcast on my mp3 player, and booted up the game I play to help myself zone out so that maybe I could wear down my brain enough to sleep.
20 minutes into the game, everything goes dark and I hear a loud bang in the distance.
A transformer somewhere in the neighborhood had blown. We now joined the ranks of those without power. My phone, which had just been put on the charger, was at about 40-something percent -- and with how quickly its old, decrepit battery drains, that wasn't nearly enough. I fumbled around in my room until I could hit my touch lights above the washer and dryer -- that I'd installed there for emergencies such as this -- and had barely enough light in my room to find my 10,000 mAh power bank -- which luckily, was charged, I immediately plugged my phone into it and took it into the bedroom, where Daisy was already about halfway asleep.
Something else that I should mention is that our house, especially the upstairs, gets really hot in the summer without AC. Also, it is necessary to have power to run the AC.
With nothing else to do, no lights, and no AC, all I could do was attempt to sleep and hope that the power and internet would return by the morning hours after everything moved off and the restoral crews could get to work. I slept fitfully, tossing and turning and sweating, as it probably reached close to 85 degrees in our bedroom without the AC running -- and Daisy is a natural furnace (the woman puts off so much body heat that it's unreal at times), so it was even hotter with her in the bed sweating too. I woke up around 6 to pee, which I had to do sitting down because dark, and went to the window to look at the tree because it was light enough to do so. The tree itself was fine, but a good 1/3 to 1/2 of its big branches were down in the yard. I couldn't see much more than that from my vantage point upstairs from the bedroom window. My phone was charged off the power bank. I got Daisy's from her once she realized I was up and moving and plugged it in to charge too.
I've often said in the past that without internet, I feel useless and out of sorts, since almost everything I do is so connected. Without internet I can't write here, I can't take care of work business or most accounting or half my shopping, or get 80% of the news and weather I usually do. When the internet is down, it's the equivalent of getting your leg chopped off at the knee. Sure, you can get around fine with some tools (like crutches) and some help, but you are extremely handicapped.
Well, I may take a bit of that back now, because being without power is far worse. Without internet you can still do some things, but without power, in 2021, you're basically thrown back into the stone age. No power means no indoor lighting, no cooking, no heating/cooling, no refrigeration of foods, no entertainment, battery-powered electronics only (until they run out of juice), including cell phones and vape devices...etc. Basically, being without power left us with running water and flushable toilets and that's about it.
We've been through power outages before, and I've been through a great deal of them myself over the many years I've been alive. We had power go out last year or the year before for an hour or two, and during some storms or planned maintenance in the apartment complex, we had power go out for 4-5 hours at a time on occasion. When I lived in Missouri and Kansas, storms would routinely take out power for a day or so once or twice a year. During the ice storm of 2007 when I was in St. Joseph, we lost power to our apartment complex for at least three days in the middle of winter, and that sucked. So, I mean, I'm not a stranger to this sort of thing.
However, those were different times and this is 2021, where nothing functions without power. Society can still mostly operate without internet, but not without power. Also, and this is really problematic on its own, without power we are trapped at home. We have a small garage (so small that we can't open both driver and passenger doors at the same time when the car is inside it) with a garage door opener...an electric garage door opener. An electric garage door opener that we cannot disengage while the car is in the garage because we cannot reach the rope for it while the car is in the garage (not to mention that I have no clue how to re-engage it once it's disengaged, because we've never done it before). Adding insult to injury here is that our front door's locking mechanism was busted on the knob -- the deadbolt works fine, but I have no idea if I/we have keys to it -- so for the past three years we've owned the place, the only way we've gotten in and out of the house has been the garage. It's all we've needed.
Yes, we can lock the door just fine from the inside. We don't have an unlocked front door or anything like that, because we're not stupid and we don't live in the best part of town anyway. Getting in again from the outside, however...well...
We went out our back door and around to the side and front of the house to assess the damage once it was light enough to see everything. What we found was...extensive.
Yes, that is a pic of me, standing between our house (left) and the neighbor's house (right) surrounded by tree. That is one big branch and I'm standing in the middle of it.
Most of the branches of one of our two big maple trees in the front yard were down (you can see the tree parallel with the edge of our house, on the left, still standing). The pictured branch above was the largest that came down and the one that made the scraping and resounding thud as it did. At its thickest, it was as big around as my leg. Daisy and I could not physically move it.
We are extremely lucky. This branch, had it fallen six inches further to the right of where I'm standing in this photo, would have demolished our neighbor's car, which you can see in the photo behind the leaves on the right. It came down just between our homes, crushing part of her plastic gutter spout (which was easily fixed) and breaking apart her snap-together plastic tool shed (also easily put back together) with its very tips brushing up against her siding and nothing hitting either house. This was all 100% pure luck and scary as hell to see.
Our back yard was fine; while we have trees back there, they're much smaller and didn't suffer damage, and the garden was fine as well.
The front yard was a different story.
Also of note -- the big three-pane bay window on the upper right of this photo is our dining room. If you look under that, you can see a large branch there as well in our rock bed. That branch barely scraped the front window as it came down (there's a very light scratch on the glass) -- had it come down six or eight inches closer to the house, that window would've been busted out.
So...what were we to do? We couldn't just leave the giant branches in the yard, and they were too big for us to really do anything with ourselves with the tools we have -- we have a folding handsaw and some bolt-cutter sized branch loppers, but most of the branches that came down were too large for them, and let me tell you, using a handsaw to break down a tree branch the size of your leg fucking sucks. Moreover, even if we could cut them up and clean up the yard...where would we put them? We don't have a truck (anymore) with which to haul them away, and the pile would take up a LOT of space.
Daisy began using her limited cell phone power (while mine was recharging) to look up tree-removal and like, landscaping people who might be able to cut up the branches and haul them away. One company quoted her $950, which is ludicrous, and a few others wouldn't get back to her until hours upon hours later. The Zoo, who normally loves big donations of branches, don't take maples. Many other tree folks were completely booked, as they had been swamped with calls after the storms rolled through. We should have really guessed that at the time, but without power and internet we didn't know how much damage had occurred around town because, well, we had no way of actually really finding that information out aside from people on Facebook bitching about not having power.
Daisy finally found a guy who was willing to come by and give us an estimate, and told her on the phone based on her description that it would be a $75-100 job. He did not, however, know when he would be able to make it out to the house as he had a lot of other jobs lined up.
At around noon, I was exhausted. I'd barely slept, the power was still off, I was hot and sweaty and couldn't shower because, well, to do that I'd need lights in the bathroom -- not to mention that once the hot water in the tank was gone, it would remain gone -- and I sat back down in my chair upstairs to just read some comics and try to decompress. I have so much reading material at my disposal, so many comics stacked up that I only read 1-2 of at a time anymore (part of why I let a lot of my subscriptions expire when they ran out; I can't keep up) when around 1:30-2 or so....the power came back on.
"Don't start turning everything on yet," I told Daisy, "because who knows how long this will last."
I was correct; we had a few small blips over the next 10-15 minutes, but after that everything stabilized. We once more had AC, refrigeration, the ability to charge our phones and my vapes, we could leave the house if we wanted to, etc.
We were, however, still without internet. I called this in, of course (now that I had power and could see we were still down) and was given an estimated time to repair of around 4PM. Satisfied with that, I flopped back down in my chair where my exhausted ass drifted off into a nap.
And then the second storm hit.
I really wish I was making this up, because at this juncture I was already pissed off and stressed out enough to where this was just one more thing to make me screaming angry.
An hour or so into my nap, it got very dark very quickly and another big, very windy storm rolled through -- heavy rain, loud thunder, bright lightning...and wind, wind blowing our tree, our tree that had already been damaged...
Remarkably, this storm didn't cause any more damage. A branch or two that were probably weakened by the first storm came down in the yard and landed amongst the others, but they weren't huge. In any other situation we would've been like "wow, that wind's blowing really hard, look at the big branch it took down" but compared to the ones the size of my leg, one the circumference of a soda can wasn't a huge concern to us.
The storm went as quickly as it had come, and as the internet was still down afterwards (and as we had not, remarkably, lost power again) I laid down on the couch and passed out for several hours.
When I awakened, it was dark and we still had power, but still did not have internet. The estimated time of repair for the internet had gone from 4PM to "currently there is no estimated time to repair" with is generally a bad thing when it comes to internet service in this town -- could be hours, could be days. I was not incredibly concerned but it was a major annoyance and one more thing that we had to deal with. I attempted to stay up as late as possible throughout the night, playing my game on my computer and listening to podcasts, because as long as the internet returned on Sunday...I still had to go back to work as per the usual.
Mind you, throughout this entire time we were still planning our trip to South Dakota, so we still had to make sure we had food and essentials to pack and ready to take with us -- marking off checklists and planning the actual trip itself, where we would be and when, to maximize efficiency. Daisy had gotten us booked into a Super 8 in Sturgis (believe me, there will be more on this later) for what seemed at the time to be really high rates for some reason (again, more on this later) so our lodgings would be taken care of -- it was just about the logistics of everything else. We weren't going to leave the house for several days without getting the trees taken care of first, and since we were going to be around all of the family, Daisy wanted us to go get new phones so we could all take the best pictures possible -- so, I mean, we had more important things we needed to be doing.
By Sunday afternoon, we had a guy come out to the house to look at the tree branches and damage -- this was the guy who quoted us $75 to $100 on the phone. He and his helper/associate walked around the yard, gauged the limb sizes and the amount of work they'd need to do, and seemed impressed (or otherwise slightly surprised) by the amount of branches and how big some of them were.
"Ehhh...I'm guessing it would be about $300 for all of this," he said finally.
"Sold," I immediately replied.
Daisy and I had discussed beforehand that the maximum we were willing to pay anyone to get rid of the branches was $300. We reasoned that for $300 we could go purchase a chainsaw, cut up everything, rent a truck for an hour or two from Lowe's to load it up, and then haul it to the dump/branch collection areas ourselves. It would be a lot of work and would suck, but it was do-able. Above $300 was the cutoff point for that where we would just take care of it, but $300 and below we were fine with. We'd surrendered to the fact that we were going to have to spend the money either way, whether we wanted to or not.
Anyway, the tree guy let us know that he'd circle back our way later that evening if he had time, but if not, definitely on Monday -- to get it all done. We told him to keep us posted, and he left.
When we came back inside, the internet -- which had been down for over 36 hours at this point -- had miraculously been restored.
"Shit," I told Daisy, "that means I have to work tonight."
It was around 4pm by this time, and I'd been awake since noon or so. Being awake since noon is hard when you have to work from 10pm to 7am, and harder still when your sleep has been incredibly disjointed by storms, worry/anxiety, stress about an upcoming trip, a long power/internet outage, etc.
"Let's go get our new phones," Daisy said. "And in case the power goes out again, let's just get the new knob/lock and deadbolt for the front door, so we can get in and out of the house.
I mentioned before that Daisy wanted us to go upgrade our phones before the trip, so that she could have the best phone possible to take the best pictures possible of everyone in the family. While my own iPhone 7 worked flawlessly (mechanically, anyway), its battery capacity was abysmal and while running an app or two, or playing a game, I could legit watch the battery levels dropping 5-10% every few minutes. This is not good for a long-haul trip to South Dakota where the phone would continually be burning battery life while searching for signal -- and I hate needing to keep it plugged in all the time to make the phone be actually usable for anything other than a quick call or a few texts.
So, we went to the T-Mobile (who has now merged with our carrier, Sprint) store to get our new phones and to transfer the service and files from our old phones to our new ones in-house. They gave us a wait time of about 40 minutes before we could even get serviced, so we got ourselves on the appointment list and drove down the street to the local Lowe's to pick up a new doorknob/lock and deadbolt system. We found one we liked, purchased it, and went back to the T-Mobile store. On the way, we also stopped at Best Buy and got Daisy a new case for her new phone (I'd already ordered a case for mine and it had arrived at the house via Amazon on Saturday -- before the storm we'd been planning to go get the new phones on Friday night, but hadn't had time).
The file transfer process for Daisy's phone was pretty simple -- she'd deleted and archived almost everything off her old phone previously and there wasn't much to transfer. For me, even though I'd done the same thing, there were a few complications:
1. the iPhone 7 32GB is ancient and I was upgrading to an iPhone 12 Mini 128GB.
2. apparently nobody wants the iPhone 12 Mini 128GB in blue (the color I chose).
3. because nobody wants that phone they can't really move them, and therefore I had gotten the only one they had in stock in the store.
4. because nobody wants that phone and they can't move them, my new phone had a dead battery out of the box.
5. you can't transfer files from one phone to the other until the new phone is at least at 50% battery and plugged in.
6. because my new phone was dead out of the box and had never been powered up since shipment, there were multiple new iOS upgrades it had to download and install before the file transfer could take place.
As an aside, I've been asked why I wanted the iPhone 12 Mini 128GB instead of the iPhone 12 Pro Max. It's because I don't want a giant phone that I need both hands to use. I loved my old iPhone 5 because it was so small and would fit into any pocket of any clothing I owned. It was tiny, it was light, I could get almost any case I wanted for it, and I could do everything on it with one hand. When I upgraded to the 7, it was bigger and flatter, but I got used to it. It also fit less comfortably into my pockets and I was more limited on case design for it, but it was overall fine. I didn't want a new phone larger than the 7. The redesigned iPhone SE for 2020 was the hardware of the 11 in the case of the 7/8, and that's what I was originally planning to get (as it was also much cheaper) but only the iPhone 12 models were available for buyback rebates on our upgrades...so I chose the smallest 12 possible, which was the Mini, with the highest amount of memory they had on it in stock. That ended up being the blue one with 128GB, which is likely far more space than I'll ever need, but eh.
I did very briefly consider going all out and getting the 12 Pro Max until I got to see it and hold it in the store, and immediately declared that it was far too large for me to use comfortably -- and, simply, I do not need that much phone. I don't give a shit about the multiple camera system, I don't need 256 or 512GB (I can't remember what the highest end of it was for the Pro Max), and I never watch or stream anything on my mobile devices. I have no good use for it, and if I wanted to spend that much on an Apple product I'd buy a goddamn Macbook. I don't need to carry an iPad with calling capabilities in my pocket.
Our upgrade plan allowed Daisy to get $800 for her trade-in from her old Galaxy S8, and $400-something trade-in on my old iPhone 7, so we just decided to do that. Daisy, by the way, decided to upgrade to the highest-end Samsung Galaxy G21 Ultra, which is (by most accounts) the best phone on the market today. It's also one of the most expensive, but ehhhh...when you're getting an $800 discount by trading your old phone in, I can't say I necessarily blame her.
Anyway, back to the story.
The backups/transfers from my old phone to my new one failed, repeatedly -- which is to me, a nightmare scenario -- so apparently the quick and dirty way to do it was to upload everything on my phone to iCloud, have them wipe the old phone and factory-reset it for trade-in, and then restore it to the new phone from iCloud at home. This was a terrifying prospect to me because it can only be done once without another factory reset, and required wifi at home to make it work -- if the unstable internet went down again while it was happening, the new iPhone 12 Mini would basically be bricked. They sent us home, as the store was closing, and I was not happy about the scenario. I did, however, watch the store guy factory-reset my old phone while I was there, so I knew that had been taken care of, at least.
I gingerly took the new iPhone home (as it didn't have a case on it yet and was still a blank slate), plugged it in, and started the transfer process from iCloud. Remarkably, it went off without a hitch, and about an hour later my new phone was exactly the same as my old one. I had to re-sign-in to all of my apps and the like, but the phone was perfectly normal and functional once everything had been transferred.
However, that's not the end of this story (of course it isn't), because as we were leaving the T-Mobile store, Daisy had gotten a text from the tree guy that said he could be back at our place by 7:30 to take care of the trees/branches. It's summer, we have daylight long into the evening hours, so we said yes, that would be great. It would also mean that their chainsawing and moving of branches wouldn't interrupt my sleep cycles the next day, and that I wouldn't have to get up and pay them when they were done.
As promised, they arrived at 7:30 with their big truck and long trailer, and began their work. Between three guys, a ladder, and a couple of chainsaws, they were completely done with everything in an hour. And I mean everything, too. There wasn't a stick or branch of any size left in our yard, everything had been cut up and moved onto the trailer/tied down, and our yard was so clean you couldn't tell that anything had happened. It was remarkable. We asked them about the tree itself, if (from their considerable knowledge) it looked like further branches would come down in the next storm, and they said they didn't really think so -- this storm thinned it out enough to where most of what was left looked pretty sturdy and not prone to breaking or falling -- not to mention that the tree itself looked pretty healthy otherwise. The same went for our other tree, the one where we did not lose many branches or parts from. To take down the tree completely or to dessicate it enough to where it would no longer be a problem at all, the tree guys relayed that it would likely be $500-1000 in the event that were ever necessary. I made a mental note of that because it will, likely, eventually be necessary -- hopefully not in the short run, but the trees are both large and it's only going to take another storm or two like this last one to really make the thinned out one necessary to take down, if it doesn't come down on its own. We do live in tornado country, after all.
I happily wrote a check to the tree crew and they left, and our lives finally felt like we were reaching some semblance of normal again for the first time in several days. I made sure my phone was fully charged and got something to eat, Daisy spent about 40 minutes removing the old lock and knob from our door and installed the new one, and then bam, back to work for me -- since the internet was working and the power was on.
And so ends the story of the Class III Killstorm of July 2021.
I would like to note that just because it ended well for us (albeit being expensive) does not mean that it ended well for others. My boss was in a part of town where power didn't get restored until Tuesday, and even on Wednesday there were still tens of thousands without power before most everyone got restored by the end of the week. Tree and landscaping services are now booked out for weeks on end in most areas affected by the storm, and the city of Omaha announced that they'd do curbside pickup on trash days for whatever residents could bring to the curb, with nebulously-defined limits on that. We would not have been able to take part in that anyway was we couldn't move the bigger limbs ourselves, nor could we chop it all up without the tools/chainsaws our tree guys had, nor would we actually be in town for the pickup days. There was still a lot of struggle in this town as many who had their power restored still didn't have their internet restored for much longer (like myself). I spent a large chunk of my downtime, when my phone was the only lifeline I had to the outside world, checking in with and texting friends around town asking them is there was anything they needed that we could provide -- food, shelter, etc. Remarkably, a lot of them were unscathed and some of them didn't even lose power or internet in the storms (Daisy's parents didn't, though the storm did shake them up a bit).
More than anything else we came out of the situation with a grand sense of gratitude -- we could have had our house demolished, but we didn't. Windows could've been busted out by branches, but they weren't. We could have sustained roof damage or lost a lot of shingles, but we didn't -- we didn't see a single shingle lost off our roof and it appears to be intact. Our power could have been out for days (it was out for twelve hours only). The $300 spent to get the branches/trees taken care of could have been devastating to a lower-income household or a household without any savings socked away, but we were able to cover it fine. We are lucky and we are very blessed. It's situations like that storm that let us know just how much.
So, onward we go, into the story of the South Dakota trip....
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