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- The big Rocky Mountain juniper out front fell in the wind last night. It was taller than the house. Earlier I'd looked at it out my bedroom window. A branch at the top had snapped and was hanging. The whole tree was twisting. We went out in the wind to look at it. It's had cracks running down its trunk for years, ever-increasing cracks, and in the wind the cracks would expand to a couple inches across. In the wind it twisted and creaked. We knew it was a matter of time. The puppy's roommate cut off one of the lower branches to try to alleviate some pressure. Later, I heard a pop, like a gunshot - I had my bedroom door closed so the sound was dampened. The puppy's roommate said it sounded like an explosion. The tree had twisted enough that it twisted itself off its trunk and out into the front yard. Some branches bent the fence. If the puppy's roommate hadn't cut off that lower branch, the fence would have been completely crushed. The stump left behind is cool - tall, the squirrel's hole still there. The tree was dead on the inside but the outer layers are beautiful wood, red and white. This is the tree the puppy used to climb up, up to the first lower branch 6 feet in the air. There was a hole up above it that the squirrels used and a few years ago the puppy's roommate put a screen over the hole to keep the squirrels out. After that, for a while, the squirrels tried to pull the screen off, but they soon gave up. (He made sure that there were no squirrels inside before screening it up.) Last year one came back and tried again. The fir in the backyard looks wind-whipped and scraggly. A big branch fell onto the sidewalk outside the fence There are boxes blown up from the alley into our little ravine. It's still freekin windy out there but nothing like it was doing all night. A friend posted on facebook last night that a big spruce had fallen next to their house and I was looking for that post again this morning and got so annoyed by facebook that I am sanctimoniously pleased to announce that I will be practicing social media distancing. I mean I've already been doing it but it's not really a thing until you announce it to people. Social media distancing is the conscious decoupling of yourself from the idiotic feed in facebook. I try to look at facebook a couple times a week and I'd missed a lot of things that have been spreading around this week and it was a lot better without it. Anyway.
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