Saturday 5-25-24 Clean Up Begins, Power On & Wildlife

 

We had a wonderful Saturday with the high of 94 degrees.

We started the day out by driving around Belton and Temple to see what was going on. We started off at Walmart in Belton, we bought breakfast and a couple of salads. Most of Belton did not appear to have much damage, there were some damaged houses and some downed trees but for the most part it looked mostly normal, power had been restored so businesses were open. We saw Oncor hard at work. 

Next we drove over to Temple where things were much worse. We started on Addams and saw some businesses were destroyed. One taco restaurant was completely gone, a bank was gone, a strip shopping center had lost all of its roof and part of the building. Many homes were severely damaged. We drove by a friend's (Lynn) house and saw she had trees down and one on her roof. There were tarps on lots of roofs. Many of the areas was still without power, however, there were a huge number of trucks and workers trying to clear trees and get things back working.

We drove to Morgan Point to see if their brush dump was open, it was. The sign on the gate said it was only open on Saturdays 8:00 am to 12:00 pm. It was very busy. On the way home we stopped and Larry asked a police officer about the hours of the dump. He said it was going to be open everyday until the clean up from the storm is finished.

A landscaping crew, that Jason had asked to work on the trees showed up at 10:30. Before they arrived Jason and Larry had talked on the phone so we knew they were coming. Out lot provides better access to the damaged trees. Larry moved the Minnie over to the other side of the drive so they could back in with their trailer, this also allowed them to use their small skidder to load logs into the trailer. They worked on removing the trees until 4:00. They will be back tomorrow to do some more work. They moved the trees from the side of the house and cut a tree down. They continued to move towards the back of the yard. They got rid of the pieces of the downed trees at the back of the yard along the fence line. Jason came home for a couple of hours and helped the crew. They made three trips to the brush dump. 

 

Tree down on Jason's air conditioner 

 

Tree down on the side of the house

 

The skidder used to move the big pieces of the trees

Trailer they put the trees in

 

Using a chainsaw to cut tree down 

Sawing a tree down

 

Knocking the tree down with the skidder

The crew working on removing the tree

 

The side of the house with the trees gone, a few years ago there were so many trees that you could not see the side of our house from the road.

Trees gone from the back of yard

Our neighbors across the street from us wanted to take their grandchildren camping so we told them we would keep an eye on their generator. Today we went to their home at 2:30 and changed out the generators. Larry changed their extension cord from the gas generator to the propane generator. Now their ok while they're camping.

 

Larry changing generators out

Gas generator (red) and propane generator

I played the Daily Challenges of Solitaire and the Event. Today the event was Event: Hard Road Mini of 5 games. It took me 42 minutes and 42 seconds to complete, which put me in 16th place in my group. Then I played some Angry Birds.

In the evening the power came back on at 7:00. We had been without power for almost exactly 3 days. Just to be sure we waited a bit before plugging everything back into the home power and putting all the extension cords away. We also plugged the extension cord that is running to Jason's house into in our home power and shut off the generator. Jason and his family had gone out of town, he came back for a few hours but had left. They will be home late tomorrow.

Larry had texted a couple of our neighbors to let them know the power was back on. Jason called and asked Larry if he could go next door to his bed and breakfast rental and get some things going. Larry was happy to help. The house had been rented out for this weekend. Even though there was no power the renters had still wanted to come and use the place. Much of the house can be controlled remotely but the systems to do that were not working. Working with Jason via the phone Larry was able to get everything back running.

After getting everything back to normal we watched an episode of Northern Exposure. After Larry went to bed I watched a movie on Amazon called A Million Miles Away. It was based on a true story about a migrate work, who became an astronaut. It was good except there was some subtitles because it was in Spanish and English. Then I watched Men In Black from our movies. I ended up doing 17,500 steps, which put me in 2nd place in my group. 

The power went out again about midnight but fortunately it was only off for about 10 minutes.