Where The Heck Have I been?

...you may wonder??? Well, it's a funny story, ya see. Mother nature decided to show a little muscle and rough us up around here. And the stars? Not in alignment, my friends. Crazy crazy week. Company stress. Lots of it. A 50 foot pine tree fell down on both our cars simultaneously last Saturday. Ruby & I under the weather again. Me more than her, thank God. Poor kid's been tossing and turning again which means little sleep for me. I wake up when she wakes up. She goes back to sleep and is bright eyed and cheerful in the morning. But I usually can't and end up waking at 4 or 5am. I guess it's all that is on my mind. But the worst part... was living without internet, cable, and home phone for 4 days! LOL, I'm not sure how I survived it! :-) Ha ha. But really, what DID we do before email? Blogger? GOOGLE??? Gasp! We actually had to look things up in a DICTIONARY or ENCYCLOPEDIA! Good grief. Our kids will really get a chuckle out of that one day.

Anyway, despite all this madness, we are fine. Cars are getting repaired, rentals are here to the rescue, slowly feeling better, and all the while the party planning has continued. Ruby - and planning sweet things for her bday - make me smile every day. Even on the crazy ones. In fact, one of the first things on my mind when I saw the cars was THANK GOD WE WERE NOT IN IT! Because we were tired and not feeling great we stayed home from dance that morning. I was gonna run errands but instead I dilly dallied a long while on the computer. So really, that lovely internet time could have saved my life! (Just go with me here). But really, the bottom line is: nobody got hurt. My Ruby is ok and her parents are also intact. Cars are replaceable. People are not. Just as simple as that. So we are getting all our estimates and doing what we gotta do but grateful it wasn't worse. Here's a few shots of the cars and house...

Here is the lovely tree that came crashing down on our driveway. At first glance, I thought it had missed my car. (If only I had pulled up a few inches!)

Landed smack dab in the middle of Jeff's car's hood. Poor pretty Mr. Benz. And only a year old.

Ripped down the cable wire, elec, phone, and net. Luckily, we still had power since it took them 3 days to hang the wires back up!

All the wires were attached to this chunk of the house (right hand corner) that is now missing. Still waiting to see how much $$$ damage that is.

Here is how low the tree split. Unbelievable that a little wind can do so much damage! Mother nature showed us whose boss, now didn't she?

Now THIS is what the back of my car looked like when I went around the tree for a closer look.

And this is after the tree was cleared out of the way.

 Not pretty. But who knows? Maybe after a new trunk and paint job my 5 year old car will look brand new again. Oh, and happy to report that Ruby's tricycle was completely intact. Glad to see someone will have transportation around here! :-)

And here is Jeff's car after the "Great Tree Clean-up". Actually, not as bad as we first thought. Doesn't appear to have any structural damage. Just banged up quite a bit on the hood. We'll see what they say when the estimates come in. Still waiting to hear back from them. Fingers crossed!

So that's where the heck I have been. Life gives you obstacles to learn and grow from. So by that measure it's been a serious growth period! And hey, it's all up from here! Next post is not such a downer. It's all about pink, and really, could there be anything down about pink?