Day 141 — Tuesday, August 4, 2020 or well, that was windy

The remnants of a tropical storm headed our way this afternoon. The forecast has changed a bunch in the last couple of days, like forecasts do. The weather folks weren’t sure if we would get rain, but they were pretty sure that we’d get some high winds.

And they were right! It started late this afternoon — the dark clouds came in and it looked like it was going to pour. I was really hoping that it would because it’s been so hot and dry. We have an irrigation system that waters our lawn and my vegetable garden, but even with that the lawn has some brown spots (which annoys my husband so much!) and the soil in my raised garden beds dry out really quickly (which annoys me too, but definitely not as much as my husband and his brown patchy lawn), so a good rain storm was just what we needed.

And it did rain — for about 20 minutes, but it came down hard. And then it stopped, and the sun actually came out, but we still had the wind. I had gone out in the early afternoon to finish picking up any loose items on our back patio including the pillows from the outdoor chairs. I hid everything in our little breezeway-type area by our back door, including my two potted sunflower plants. They haven’t bloomed yet, but they also haven’t been attacked by the neighborhood squirrels and I’d like to keep it that way. And who knows what the squirrels would do in a storm, those bold assholes.

It was already pretty windy when I was out there — I propped up some of my huge tomato plants and offered them some encouragement so they’d make it through the storm. Hopefully they listened, because it got really windy after the rain stopped. Our electricity stayed on, thank goodness, but I heard some big tree branches fell down in other parts of our town and knocked out the electricity in sections of town.

And then about 7 p.m., the wind stopped and the sun was out. The two enormous trees in my yard were still standing, although one of them had a couple of larger branches jump ship. My tomato plants survived, but they were all leaning in the same direction that the wind was blowing. They looked like they’d had a rough night of drinking! Poor tomato plants — I’ll go back out to the garden tomorrow and try to prop them up with some more garden stakes. Hopefully they didn’t lose all their fruit! Those silly drunk plants!