May 18

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More storm damage from the 13th.  All of the tree bits in the front yard were in the back yard, and on the garage.....

Yikes.

Japanese maple.

Fancy violet.

I'd never noticed that violets had ridgey stems, until I saw this on "the big screen" just now.  I'll have to pay attention in the future and see if this is a common feature of violet stems.

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May 17

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On the 17th, art-quilter Sue Holdaway-Heys gave a talk and slide show about her work.  I've been a big fan for years, so this was very fun and interesting.

I think these dandelions were my favorite of all...

Love the colors, love the abstraction in the background, love the way she's shown the seeds, and the places where the seeds have come off the plants..................


Here's a closeup.  You can see the stitching........

I love the texture the writing adds to this one.  Can you see the words sewn over the trees and shadows?

Another lovely morning.

With another cloudy afternoon.

Crab apple.

Another crab apple.

This is what's left of the downed tree at the south end of my block.  With dog, for scale.

Look at all the sawdust...........

Hey!  I caught sight of a flash of red!  With black wings!  We have a lot of cardinals in our neighborhood, so a flash of red isn't that unusual.  But the black wings!  Male cardinals are red all over.  The black wings belong to a scarlet tanager.  I believe this is the only one I've ever seen.  Welcome, welcome to the neighborhood!

Here's that white lilac again.  Thank goodness for the gardeners who plant and nurture plants that everyone can enjoy!

Love the chartreuse touches in this closeup........

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May 16

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Update 9:25 am, Eastern Daylight, 5/18/14, about crane/truck


I've had so much going on that I never took pics of my mothers' day tulips!

Here they are!  They were really nice tulips; I tried to do them justice.....

I took a leaf out of the book of a photographer whose blog I used to follow.  He would get his exposure on his object, and then put a black background behind it.

A dramatic effect (and it covers up a lot of mess behind your object).

It would help to use a tripod..............

See what I mean about needing a tripod.......

And one image without the black background.

Walking.  Redbud.

These little flowers are rather exotic!

Crab apple.

Tulip

Hooray for a gorgeous day!

More storm cleanup.  I was surprised that this little bobcat had no trouble moving that big piece of tree.  I wouldn't have thought the bobcat had the weight to back that up....

We were told this crane was lifting big pieces of tree from the back yards, over the houses, to the street.  But we didn't see it happening.

Closeup of the above -- note that none of the truck's tires are on the ground....  I wonder why not.

Update:  my brother says "The truck's suspension isn't designed to carry the weight that the crane can. By lifting the truck's tires off the ground, you ensure that the suspension isn't involved in supporting the lift at all. All the weight goes in to the jack legs."  Makes perfect sense!  Thanks!  :-)



One last tulip.

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May 15

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Lily of the valley.

Hosta.

Crab apples.

I think this is spirea.

Here is what's happened to the maple-flower cluster we've been looking at.  Apparently the tree is putting more energy into leaves than into the seeds on this cluster.  Just a few seeds remain, and they don't seem to be growing very quickly.

I wish this next one were less blurry!  Love the curls at the ends of the leaves (esp. at left!), and love all those red lines.  Note that seeds do not look evenly plump.

Of course the clean-up after the storm goes on.  Crane in driveway, sawdust and blue tarp on roof....

The first downed trees I showed you were on this bit of street, but from about where that truck is.

Note crushed sidewalk........

Same stump, from the other side.   Yikes.

Beginning and ending with lily of the valley.  Pink, this time.

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May 13

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On the 12th it was stormy.  Rainy and windy.  The tornado sirens went off multiple times.  Burt and I spent some time in the (unfinished) basement.



On the 13th the radar showed we'd get some more stormy weather, so I got out and walked Burt, and walked me, before things got nasty.

Lilac.

Lots of tulips still going strong.  (With grape hyacinth underneath.)

Remember those fuzzy leaves we looked at?  Here's how they had grown, on the 13th.  I still think these are locust trees.

Redbud.

Big fish in a small (6'x8'?) pond.  I don't think this is over 18" deep, if that.  The fish go inside for the winter.  Not the frogs, though.  This neighbor likes to have bullfrogs.  If the frogs don't survive the winter, he gets more.  At the Chinese grocery.....

We think we have seen one frog in this pond this year.  We don't know if it's one of last year's frogs, or if it's a new one.

(Nearly) spent tulips.

Hmmm.  Good thing I'm nearly home.

Looking west over a cute little house.

It was windy on the 13th.  It was rainy.  No worse than the 12th.

No sirens went off.  The power, however, did go off.  So I couldn't watch tv to see what they were saying (and I couldn't see the radar).  I did not take Burt and go to the basement.

After the raining and blowing stopped, I became aware that there was more traffic than usual on our street, but I was reading, and didn't pay much attention.

Then I became aware of the helicopter.  Flying round and round.  And round and round and round and round.  Definitely not normal!

I decided to go see what was up.  I was sure some street was blocked, sending traffic up our street, but I had no idea.................................

This tree is on my block.  The neighbor in this house was out walking, before the storm, and we chatted about how we had hustled out so we could walk before things got iffy.  This big tree went right between her house and her neighbors'..............  It seems that her house sustained very little damage -- a bit to the roof. I think the neighbors were unscathed.

Zooming in on the image above -- that's the roots of the tree, just above the curb.....

Turning 90 degrees left from the above.  Looking west.  Two more big trees down.

This tree is on my street, a couple of houses south of the street we were just looking at.  The house was, again, essentially unscathed, but a smaller tree was heavily damaged.

Of course, if you were going out to look at fallen trees and tipped up sidewalks, you would bring Clifford, the Big Red Dog............  (Under Dad's arm......)

This lilac was untouched.

One thing good about only our little neighborhood being affected was that all of the recovery resources were concentrated on us, and people were on the scene to help very quickly.  (Including the power company -- the electricity was only out for about four hours.)

You know something is peculiar if you see a city bus on our little residential street.

There was way, WAY more traffic that afternoon than I had ever seen.  Not one of the vehicles you see here was parked.  All of them were trying to go somewhere.....

Yikes!

Lots of neighbors were out, looking.  Many of us were home all afternoon; none of us whose trees stayed up were aware of how bad it had been until we ventured out.  We all agreed we'd experienced it as "No worse than Monday (the 12th)," when no damage was done in our neighborhood.

I wonder if there were just one or two gusts that were able to wreak havoc?

There were trees down all over a few-block area.  Miller was blocked, Dexter was blocked, 7th was blocked (hence the volume of traffic -- including city buses!) on our street.

It had been raining and raining over many days.  The ground was saturated from Monday's storms.  All the trees I saw fell from south to north.

One tree in the middle of the block across the street from us took out two garages.  One of the garages was squished and twisted.  It looked like Dorothy's house, after it landed in Oz.  You felt you should look for stripey socks and ruby slippers, coming out from under the edge of the building...........

I only heard of one house that was seriously damaged (a tree right in the middle of it), and I heard no one was hurt.  Thank goodness for that.

Yikes.

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