Lightning

This past Memorial Day weekend, we took a trip to Northern Virginia and surrounding states to visit relatives and friends. Imagine our surprise on returning to find that our garage door window was broken, that the remotes for the door didn't work suddenly, and that my car was covered with leaves, wood chips and sawdust. Further imagine our surprise in discovering that our cable box, modem, router and septic pump were not working. And yet more surprises -- there were holes in our siding, some pretty large. There were things in the kitchen sink that had been knocked off the window sill -- we thought Roger the cat had done it.

However, we soon discovered that our neighbor's 100 foot tall poplar tree was struck by lightning on Sunday, sending sawdust and wood chips flying through the air, making missiles of the wood chips and making us very very grateful not to have been outside when this happened.

Because it's in our neighbor's yard and because it was a lightning strike, claiming it on our insurance is kind of out of the question, due to the $1000 deductible we carry. The neighbors didn't even realize their tree had been hit, since the side that was struck is facing our house. They just knew that there was a loud loud bang around 9 am Sunday morning and that they lost their TVs, invisible fence, and had things knocked off their fireplace mantle.

Hubby has wanted them to take down that tree for years, because it's so tall and will evenutally land on one of our houses -- possibly ours! He spoke with them about this again this week, and their response was that they hope the tree will die so that their insurance will cover it. I suppose they will leave it standing otherwise.

Well, things could have been worse, I suppose, but it really BITES to have to absorb the costs of all of these items because of someone else's tree.

WIP