Saved by the generator

Make that 16 tomato plants growing. I took the water walls off and found one had suffered the curse of STC. My bad.

About 5AM I was awoken by a serious storm. About that same time we lost power and appeared to be inside as strong a hurricane as we’ve ever experienced. The forecast was for severe thunder storms but this seemed a bit more than that. Lots of lightning but no thunder – kind of strange. The good news is it was all over in about 15 minutes. I got up when there was enough light to see and did a quick damage survey. Lost an oak tree and an old dead pine down by the dock. It was not just any oak tree but the one that held up the clothes line. It’ll take a day or two to get that all cleaned up – actually considering I’m going camping tomorrow, it’ll take a week. I went down to the dock and found several pieces of dock furniture in the lake. The good news is that with the low lake level, I could just wade out and retrieve it. The Poke boat, which had been laying upside down a few feet from the water’s edge was halfway in the lake. About that time, George showed up in the golf cart and we did a neighborhood tour. We must have had a mini tornado or micro burst because the place on the other side of George’s had a fairly large shed totally destroyed. In fact the metal roof was up in the trees. We called the power company and they reported we’d be out until 1PM. The last time we had a report of 5 hours, it turned out to be 12 hours so I cranked up the generator. Very slick. A few hick ups with too many refrigerators and freezers to start simultaneously but after sequencing through them, all was fine. Turns out the power outage was caused by that shed roof up in the trees along with power lines running through the same trees. We were back on line about 11AM. Sure glad we had the generator – else no morning coffee.

Nancy is making a new recipe courtesy of the west coast. It has kale (maybe a yuk), Feta Cheese and Italian sausage. I love Feta cheese and sausage so how bad can it be. Well, it wasn’t great but it was edible – once.

Nancy has been bugging me for a while about putting up a few more shelves for food storage. I am always very reluctant to add storage space because no matter how much you have, it’s never enough and is filled quickly. My answer is not to carry so much inventory. That was my line when running a manufacturing operation and that’s my line with Nancy too. Also, as simple as adding shelf space sounds, it just never turns out as easy as it first looks. I finally capitulated and sure enough, it turned out to be a bit more complex than the guy at Lowes made it sound. Actually it would have been just fine except that the design depends on the wall studs to be uniformly spaced at either 16” or 24”. I found the center stud quickly after only drilling 3 teeny weeny, nobody can see them holes. From that point you mount a horizontal bracket and then use the predrilled holes to secure the bracket to the wall. Guess what, the predrilled holes do not line up with the studs in my house. So I removed the bracket and tried to find the studs (lots of teeny weeny holes) only to learn that on one side of center, the stud was 20” removed and something like 21” on the other side. The bottom line was that if you line up the center point with the stud, all other securing hardware would miss studs. I was able to scrounge up some wall board inserts and alternate hardware to make it all work. It does look just fine and seems sturdy so all it took was about three times as long to install as advertised.