Snownado!

Some of you may not have heard yet – but Palmer got hit by a huge windstorm a few days ago. We had three solid days of winds gusting up to 91 mph with windchill factors reaching 45 below. Power is still out in places, and the destruction of property is overwhelming 

Thankfully, our house was minimally impacted. We lost our fence: Bryan found parts of it 4 houses down the block! We lost a bunch of tree branches: some are still hanging onto their trees by mere splinters, but most are scattered around the yard. Our roof is in pieces all over the place, but thankfully it’s not a structural issue – just roofing tiles. We did lose a strip of fascia covering, but I think that’s easy enough to repair.

Our biggest loss is Bryan's grille. He has an XL Big Green Egg that he uses almost every night, and just loves that thing. We thought it would be safe, because the darned thing weighs a ton at least (okay, maybe not a ton – but it does weigh a whole lot) but the winds just threw the thing off our back deck. Sadly, I believe it’s broken beyond repair, and will cost well over 1k to replace.

This has to be one of the worst storms I’ve ever experienced. Three whole days of hurricane force winds, blowing constantly 24/7. We barely got any sleep the whole time, there was just too much noise. It was quite cold, too – we had a fire going the whole time but ran out of firewood by the last day so had to switch over to our gas stove instead.

The cats did really well, despite the frightening noises. Naldo wanted to be held the whole time (highly unusual for her) but Viktor seemed to be energized by it. He ran at full speed all over the house the whole time!