Arboreal surprise

Yet another good occasion for a digital camera: the dang tree fell on the house last night! Well, half of it did--but it's a big tree!

At 12:30am, I was sitting on the couch with a beer and Same Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, L was long asleep. I heard a loud thump and then some bumpy dragging. In retrospect, I thought a car had jumped the curb and sideswiped the house. We ran upstairs (thinking about a cat disaster), ran downstairs (I have no idea why), then went outside. A neighbor was standing with his bicycle (he still hasn't said why he was biking at 12:30) in the street and said: "Dude, your tree fell over."

Huh?

So I turned to go into the back yard and was confronted by a solid wall of leaves. Going around the corner, we could see half the tree had come down on the house. A guy camping in his van insisted that he had been unable to sleep an hour earlier because, "Man, it was like there was electricity in the air. You know how that feels?" Lydia asked "Like right before a lightning strike?" "No, like electric dust man."

At this point Eugene's finest pulled up and asked what was going on. I just pointed up, and couldn't think about exactly what to say. I think it came out as "There used to be a tree there."

So today we are spending emergency money. Whenever we talked about how much we should have on hand, it was always for a hot water heater or a washing machine. It never occurred to me that emergency tree removal would be on the plate.