Saturday, March 19, 2005

whoosh

If this wind actually does rip the roof off of the house and kill me, I just want it to be known that I'd prefer a Viking funeral.

I'm upstairs and we're getting tremendously powerful gusts of wind that are aimed right at the broad expanse of the roof, and the house is swaying. It's probably only moving an inch or two, but it feels a lot like when I was in So Cal and the Northridge quake went down... in between one footfall and another the ground had moved out from underneath your feet, it looked like everybody was suddenly made drunk.

That brings to mind a passage from 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy':

"It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."

When we moved in to this house one of the first things we did was cut down this hugacious tree in the backyard, a towering spruce. Being treehugger types we fretted over the decision to do this, but the thing was on the south end of the lot and the entire yard was in its shadow... it was like they had determined the property boundaries by going outside every so often and marking where the tip of the tree's shadow touched the ground. We finally figured that cutting it down would, in the long run, actually increase the biomass in the yard because the gardens would get sunlight.

The treecutters spent the day climbing around 50 feet up lopping off limbs, and by the afternoon they had reached the base. Removing the last bit of trunk they found that some fungus had been eating away the base of the tree... it was still stable, but in time it would have fallen over.

Onto the house.

During a windstorm.

*blink*.

On the other hand, maybe that tree was the only thing sheltering this house from the winds, and now that it's gone we're right proper fucked.