Oh No! Ernesto!

I wanted to post this last night, but in that great MetroCast tradition my internet was out. I'm super glad that no trees fell on the house (and moreover that no one was hurt in general) but check out what I found in my back yard when I returned from Connecticut.

So I've been in Maryland for almost 4 years now, and I've seen 2 forest-clearing storms where literally hundreds of trees are knocked down. Seriously- Greenbrier (my neighborhood) has trees down everywhere, and other places are even worse. These trees take like 30 years to grow, so how are there any left? I guess I'm just glad they're in my neighbor's yard and not mine. Hopefully it'll get hauled away before too long. I don't think anyone actually lives there.

Story time! I know a tree hit my house during hurricane Isabel in 2003 (before I lived there). During the inspection they pointed out the new piece of siding- of course it doesn't match. The color's right but the texture is different, but you have to be looking pretty close to notice. So I thought "Big deal. They fixed it, so what's the problem?"

Anyway, when I was cleaning out the attic (getting ready to finish it off) I saw some light coming from that side of the house. When I got down there, guess what I found- that's right, a big old tree branch! Plus, there was a big hole in the wall that was only covered by siding. So what happened was during the hurricane, a tree hit the garage and punched right through to the attic. To clean it up, they cut off the branch, replaced the damaged siding, and nothing else. They didn't fix the broken plywood, and they didn't even take the giant tree limb out of the attic! So when my family came to help with the attic my dad helped me patch up the holes, and cut up and haul away the branch. That definitely scores a 9 on the half-ass-o-meter.