Tuesday, May 24, 2011

I plan to be proud to partake of your patio room**

Yesterday morning, before the work began:

Yesterday afternoon, as the work was winding down:

Yesterday evening, after the storm that dumped several inches of rain and hail on us:

Luckily, the track that will hold the third wall up wasn't installed yet, so I used a shop broom to sweep the water out of my new, 2" deep swimming pool that's located conveniently right above the sump pump in the foundation.  Then I spent an hour this morning blowing all the leaves out, and setting up fans to try to get the concrete dry enough for them to glue down the third track today.  The volume of leaves knocked down by the hail was impressive - maybe 25% of what was on the trees in our neighbors yard ended up plastered all over the side of our house and every other vertical surface in our yard ... like the panels that will make up parts of the walls of the room:


I keep telling myself that at least I won't have to rake those leaves up this fall, but the suckers will probably regenerate by then.

The hail wasn't record-sized, but it was kind of cool to see that it was obviously formed in two steps instead of one continuous process:

Not huge, but we got quite a bit of it.  This was taken more than an hour after the storm:

My plants were not exactly in favor of the giant julienne-slicers falling from the sky: 

What's funny is that I always take pictures of my new gardens right after I've mulched them, and I always joke that I have to do it then, because it's never going to look that nice again.  Good thing I did, too, since this was what it looked like on Sunday:
Notice the non-shredded hostas right above this?

Oh, well, at least we didn't lose any trees, have the power go out, or end up with a flooded basement.  Things could have been much worse than having to do a bit of sweeping and ending up with a lot of new "green" material for my compost pile.

** When Harry Met Sally reference.

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