Fall is one of my favorite seasons but I hate that I have a headache every fall for about 2 weeks! I can't wait until they end so that I can enjoy this glorious weather. It is absolutely beautiful out today, sunny and in the 70's.

So, we had a big wind storm on Sunday... the remains of hurricane Ike. I have never seen wind blow so hard in all my life. Around 4pm Rose called and said one of her trees had blown over and was blocking her neighbor's driveway and would we come in and help her clean it up. On the way in John swore he'd kill her if the "tree" turned out to be a little branch. But, it turned out it really was a whole tree! Everywhere you looked trees, branches and debris were blowing around. Samantha was terrified and I can't say I blame her. It was pretty scary out there. I thought a tree was going to blow over onto us while we were cleaning up. When we got home we found one of our trees in the back yard had blown over! It came up at the roots too and landed on our fence. Boy were we lucky... it snapped off a few of our fence boards but none of the broke. John and I had a saw and clippers and were standing there plotting our plan of attack when we heard a noise... and, there coming around the corner of the house was one of our neighbors with a chainsaw! We couldn't believe our luck! He had that tree all cut up in about 45 minutes. It would have taken us hours. Everyone in the neighborhood was loosing shingles left and right but thankfully we did not loose any. Our house is a ranch and there are 2 two story houses on either side of us so I think that helped. Samantha and I went out several time to check the roof and we had to hold hands so Samantha didn't blow away! The power went out around 5pm and came back on Monday morning. Again we considered ourselves lucky because some people are still without power and some schools are still closed because of it.

John had the day off today and he got most of our fallen tree bundled up. It looks so strange without that tree back there! We saved the trunk that our neighbor had cut up with the chainsaw and are going to let it dry to burn in the fire pit next year. John burned some of the small branches and dead leaves which really made it feel and smell like fall!