Back to work

Here's some pictures of what happened the night before we drove into Milford Nebraska to visit Grinnygranny's Mom.

This is the tree directly in front of Rose's apartment. There was tree damage like this and worse in a 70 mile radius. We saw a truck that a tree had fallen on and one house where a limb landed on the roof. One of the neighbors said the wind was twisting the trees like a rope, but it stayed high and there wasn't much property damage. Crops were flattened closer to Lincoln, but none were affected around Milford. Fortunately the limb that broke off went the other direction and Rose's medication knocks her out at night (she's also rather hard of hearing). The storm hit around 3 or 4 in the morning so she didn't know what happened until she woke up.

Bob (Grinnygranny's brother) showed up with a chain saw a little after we got there and started cutting away at this and two other trees that had fallen limbs in the complex. I helped move the cut limbs to the street. Most of it was stacked up and waiting for the city to collect for the chipper in about four hours. The bigger pieces were hauled away by a guy with an ATV. Two of the largest pieces had to wait until the next day as the chain on the chain saw got dull. Bob had to buy a new chain and have the old one sharpened. That night he was worried that he wouldn't be able to buy a new chain. By noon the next day all was clear except half of the tree was missing. They'll have to cut it down as there's too much damage to leave it. I figured hauling all those tree limbs was as good a work out as a round of golf. We'd taken our clubs, but the golf course was closed while they cleaned up their downed trees.

• Bruce has videos up at his blog from the meeting we were at last week. Check out Jimmy Carter's speech and some of the other speakers that were there. He also has links to the many news articles about the two days of meetings.
• Mom has a good post on getting to meet the former president at her blog.
• Grinnygranny, Auntypesty and I enjoyed the meetings and services, but that's as much as I want to say about it right now.
• Today I was back in the classroom. It's starting off rather different this year. Usually we work one day of registration, have a day or two of in-service and then the students are in class. Today I had to be in the classroom, but I don't work registration until tomorrow. So I had the full day to set up my room. I'll have a half day in my room tomorrow after working registration in the morning. Friday is the usual start-the-new-year-off in-service. Monday is a newly negotiated teacher work day to be in our rooms and Tuesday and Wednesday we have two days of being lectured to in-services. The legislature mandated in-services be held before the school year so we don't have them within the semesters. Classes don't start until next Thursday. Two and a half days to get the room ready. I'm ready after one. Still in previous years we had all of about an hour to organize things before the kids hit the desks.