Damnit Dude, Not Cool

Maureen and I are probably within 2 or 3 weeks of finally moving into our new home. That is immensely exciting and would officially mark the end of the major fixes/updates/improvements to the home for some short time. I think today, a greater power must have thought I was getting a little bit too cocky about the promise of putting the major work temporarily behind me.

That empty space to the upper left of the photo is where one half of our large, shade-giving patio tree used to reside.
This is where that part of the tree now resides - our backyard.

This happened at about 8:30 tonight and was the result of the largest storm of which I have ever been a part. While I was cleaning a paintbrush in the basement tonight I started to wonder why it was so loud in our house from the rain, and I wrote it off to shoddy insulation. As it turned out, the noise was a function of massive hail being blown by 60 mph winds off the siding. That was crazy.

I was in the process of cleaning up the paintbrush because I was about to finish up work at the house and join Maureen at our still-rented condo for the evening. At the condo, contractors and painters have been in and out of the place the past two days fixing the damage from the water heater that sprung a leak a ways back. Because of this, we were without hot water or air conditioning the past two days. It was weird to take a freezing cold shower yesterday and then get out and immediately start sweating because the condo was 85 degrees without the air on. So anyway, today everything was back working, except for that the storm that blew out power and blew down our tree in Northville also blew out the power in Livonia. No power anywhere, so Maureen and I are currently in the basement at my parents house watching TV right now. I don't mind being at my folks', but this has been an annoying couple days.

Back to the tree briefly, we'll now probably have to get the whole tree removed (after first removing part of the brick patio) and plant something that doesn't offer shade for 20 years. So...that sucks. It's not like we're not pooping out money right now on all the other house work, so why not have an act of nature cause us to poop more money. The silver lining is that the branch didn't actually fall directly on the house. I truly don't think my heart could have taken that.