The harvest is astonishing

After the utterly wild storm of last Thursday, that is.  Yesterday and today, I picked up about forty pounds of pecans that were blown off my trees by the storm, and I still have half the front yard and half the back to be done, which means probably another thirty pounds to be got up.  And that, O Best Beloved, means I should get nearly a hundred and fifty pounds of nuts by the time I’m done.  I’m flat-out flabbergasted.

The storms were something else, with tornadoes bouncing all over the area, forty-mile-plus straight winds, marble-sized hail, rain squalls too heavy to see through, and flash flooding all over the place.  I had to go out into the worst of it to pick up T and M; fortunately, M fell asleep in the car while I was fighting to see where the streets were, so I didn’t have to listen to her howling while I was wound altogether too tight, trying not to wreck the car.  The trip from the day-care center to T’s high school, which should have taken a quarter of an hour, took more than twice that because of traffic and street lights out across a broad swath of the city, and people stopping dead in the middle of the road, waiting (I suppose) until they felt they could see more—which increased the likelihood of rear-ending someone you couldn’t see until it was too late to stop.

I managed to get T from her school, shooing away a principal who wanted to know if I knew what the weather was like (which, considering what I’d just survived even to get there, ranks high for Fatuous Question of the Day).  Coming away from the school, I managed to run into an area of flooded streets, being turned back twice by firemen posted to keep cars out of the real waterholes.  At one point the car did actually float for a second or two, but fortunately I fought clear of that area before it got really nasty.  And somewhere in there, I shipped a bunch of water into the rear floorboard, and now the carpets smell horribly of mildew.  I predict a trip to rent a steam carpet cleaner is in the near future.

Duran Duran keeps the modified electric bill.  Fnord.