Where have the days gone?

Ok, I have to admit, I got a little behind in my Zero to Hero Challenge. The reason for it is simple, I found the next challenge quite hard. The one I got stuck on, was “Build on your last post“. The post that was meant was this one, about the wood that we gathered as a family.

Now normally, a follow up should be really easy. I could tell you all about the weather that we have been having recently (which has been crazy!). Right now, I can’t even tell you anymore, why I got so terribly stuck with that challenge. I should just write it all down really fast right now, before something else gets in my way.

On Wednesday (12/02/2014) Ireland was hit by a bad storm, which has by now been classified as one of the Top 5 storms to hit Ireland since records began. Apparently it still has the potential to be called “The worst storm”, depending on the final assessment of all damages. It has hit us, as part of I think 9 separate storms, since the start of the year. Pictures of the damages caused by these storms are quite scary, I have never seen anything like it. You can go here to find some pictures.

On that Wednesday, when I finally made it home (2 out of 3 access routes were blocked by fallen trees, and the third was only passable when police waved you past a small wood) I was greeted by small chaos in our backyard. Water was standing on our patio to about 3 inches and the fences on both sides were blown over. One side fell victim to our big trampoline, which decided that staying in our garden was no fun, and instead moved over to our neighbour 3 doors down. Stephen had already managed to get the trampoline back into our garden, and has secured it as best he could, with bags of old ash. He got help for this from neighbours, and it was nice to see the community spirit really working. We were by far not as badly affected as other regions of Ireland, (one town declared a state of emergency, and a mini hurricane was spotted in another) but at the same time it was scary, because this kind of weather is so out of the ordinary for us.

Despite the weather, Zelda was getting anxious for a walk, so we headed out, once the chaos in the garden was cleared and the wind died down a little bit. We went for our usual route, which is close to the river, and quite exposed to the wind in the middle of 2 rows of trees. One part of the route was particularly bad, if I had known, how many trees went down on that stretch, I would not have walked it, but by the time I realised, the way back was as bad as the way forward. You can see below a few pictures I shot on that day. I haven’t walked the bit of the route where the trees are down since, because I can easily see, that there has been no effort made yet, to clear them, so far people are focusing on the trees that are blocking roads and are easily accessible instead of the footpaths off the beaten track. If Stephen and I owned a chainsaw, I know we would go straight down there and start cutting down the trees for firewood. We have even been thinking of renting one for a day or two, but with no experience, a chainsaw would be a dangerous thing to hire. We’ll probably just continue to cut down the smaller branches with our little handsaw, the wood we’ve brought home so far is plenty, and will already require us to build a new wood storage solution in our garden.