Friday
Friday morning started out like any other Friday, except instead of waking up because a cat was in my face meowing at 6 AM, the howling winds outside my bedroom window jolted me awake. I stumbled into the kitchen to turn on the coffee pot, prepared a bowl of food for my sick cat and hit the power button on my computer. The rain was pounding the roof and wind rattled my windows. I reached into the kitchen sink for a spoon when my eye caught a looming figure in the still dark yard moving rapidly toward me.
Bang. Thud. And all the lights in the kitchen went out. Everything in the house stopped humming and my back-up battery on my computer began to squeal. I squinted through the darkness to try to make out what was on my deck.
It was my 30-foot beech tree. Ripped apart six-feet from the base, and its canopy had slammed on top of my roof! Leaves and limbs and twigs were scattered everywhere.
"Honey," I called for my husband, "You better get up."
I called a client whose family owns a tree service. They were booked solid. I called a contractor who referred me to Land Park Tree Service, a company that takes care of many trees on the lots of Land Park homes. Fortunately, the tree dude was only a few blocks away. He arrived, looked out my kitchen window at the looming mass filling my deck and roof and said, "I have to get a haircut. I'll be back in two hours."
Three hours went by. I called Land Park Tree dude again. Oh, somebody else needed his help on a bigger job, so he needed to push me back. Would have been nice if he had called me.
I turned to my husband. Hey, we had nothing else to do. Couldn't go online. Raining too hard to go anywhere. I figured we could don raingear, grab a couple handsaws, a ladder and tackle this job ourselves. I gave up trying to find somebody to remove the tree. Six hours later, we had the tree off the roof, and by the following day, and after buying a battery-powered chain saw, we had the tree trunk and all its accompanying limbs cut up and in the street!
Of course, it is now day four. We still have no power. Stay tuned for Part two of Sacramento power outage.
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