At home, it misted and there was little wind in the morning, and I walked to Shaw's and back. Bagels, dontcha know.
Around lunch time, the wind started, and dramatically blew open the outer front door. Which I secured by going outside and kicking it. I picked a few dropped limbs from the road.
The mail was delivered.
There were five five-second power outages, then an hourlong one, the power came back, and there was another hourlong one.
This morning I picked up a dozen and a half small maple tree branches from the yard, two larger ones, and sawed a very big branch that had fallen from one of the pine trees. The pine trees always lose big branches in every storm no matter what.
We were fortunate to be spared a direct hit. Irene was much worse by comparison: huge limbs down, wind gusts that sounded like freight trains, and flooding in the basement that I had to bail out by hand, since sump pumps don't turn on when there's no electricity. By comparison, the wind yesterday sounded like somebody bought the cheap wind machine and was learning how to play it. And the basement flooding was a mere trickle.
This morning I drove to the Hudson BJ's to get provisions, and it had no power and was thus closed. So I went to the Natick one, exiting the Pike on a very crowded ramp — since those exiting from the other direction had to navigate around a flooded ramp. Route 27 was flooded in Sudbury, so I had to improvise a route passing by my dentist to get back, and there was yet another detour around a felled tree, and a mini-detour around downed power lines.
Then it went back in.
Everybody's yard signs are still standing.
And cats lack that seventh sense about approaching storms. They were blasé about the whole thing.
