We had a line of storms, and not even all that severe, come through around 8 PM local time that first triggered "five minutes of almost continuous flickering" followed by a complete power outage, which is still in progress. My house lies in the (at this moment) 50+ projects on this outage map. If you blow it up you'll see that our little area of the Shenandoah Valley has been hit quite hard this evening and many outages have yet to be investigated.
So, amusement is limited to the computer at the moment.
Same here last weekend but things were very close to home when half the tree in my front yard went down taking out power. I thought my UPS had about 4-5 hours of life in it but batteries are getting 3-4 years old and it died after less than an hour. Eventually I turned on power in the van (inverter) and ran the freezers/fridge and Internet off it for 5-6 hours more until power came back. I lose power quite a bit more than I lose Spectrum cable actually. We've seen more and more severe storms this year than I can ever remember.
You definitely win on the "scary tree" front. We had a rotting tree in the neighbor's yard that had been dangling over our fence and my orchid collection for years now, but it started collapsing about 2 months ago and snapping parts of large living trees that could not bear the weight. I'm just really glad she had it removed about 3 weeks ago.
Our outage was almost precisely 4 hours long. I was brushing my teeth by flashlight when power came back on.
P.S. It looks like we both have cinnamon ferns, or their close relatives, in our yards.
We feed the hummingbirds too up here in central Wisconsin!
I hung a steel cable about 8' above the ground to stop the bears. The left feeder has grape jelly for the orioles. Middle feeder has a hummer in it as I took this picture (its back to us). And the right feeder is sunflower seeds with a woodpecker sitting in it right now. I buy 5 or 6 large bags of sunflower seeds at a time when I find them on sale at Fleet Farm. Picture taken just now this morning.
Couple of years ago, by one entrance to our neighborhood, an entire oak tree fell over onto someone's house. Trunk must have been at least 30" in diameter. Unfortunately for the home owner it was on an adjacent lot with an unoccupied house. They just started on repair 3 months ago and are almost done.
The ferns make me think of fiddleheads. Very popular in Maine. On occasion we got them in grocery stores in MA. Great seasonal treat. Peak season's is winding down now in most places.
Heh! I had forgot you have bears up that way. I remember as a kid going to the Harrison Hills (east of Tomahawk) dump in the evening or at night and watch the bear families rummaging through what was dumped that day. We had a summer cottage on one of the Harrison Hills lakes. As 15 year-old kid I almost hit a bear that was crossing the road while I was riding my minibike back in Lincoln County Forest. Scared the c*** out of both of us (me and the bear).
