Storms

So we had the mother and father of all storms yesterday and throughout the night.  Our electricity failed last night, came back briefly and then went off again and was off for almost 18 hours which is a bit scary.  We were very grateful for the battery LED lamp which was our Christmas present from Di and Rob - it shed a good amount of light - enough to be able to get ready for bed!!

We had heard no end of weird bangs and crashes during the course of last night so this morning we had to get up and survey if we had any damage.  We soon found the source of two big cracking sounds - the tree in the field next door had lost two large branches and fortunately they had fallen short of our wall.  This was just one of the trees that was damaged - there was another one completely uprooted and further up the road large trees had taken down the electricity cables which were causing our power outage.

We realised that the furniture up on the roof terrace had gone walkabout.  The wind had taken the legs off the coffee table and they clip in securely!!!! Two legs were flung onto the sofa and two legs had been hurled off the top onto the field next door along with the coffee table top.  The storage box which clips down tightly was no longer clipped down and my new cushion covers were missing - two were in the field, one was in the garden and one was nowhere to be seen - I found it eventually which was good - not that they were expensive but it was just irritating - they were still in their packaging unused.

To give you some idea of the weather conditions - I took this photograph this morning when I went out in search of my cushion covers.  The sun was shining on our side of the road but clearly wasn't on Nicky and Mark's!!!  Actually the weather cleared and it turned into a really nice day which made it easier that we didn't have any electric.  Thank goodness for our little gas burner because at least we could have a coffee now and again.

Whilst searching for the cushion covers we found several pieces of triplex which had been blown off of the gazebo and my shed.  As the weather warmed up John set about making some temporary repairs but it has made us think more seriously about what we are going to do about this gazebo which has been repaired on a number of occasions and we think we should replace it at some point with something more permanent.

It turned into a glorious day - this was the temperature in the conservatory in the afternoon.  I really don't know what we would do without this area.  We are all electric really save for the little gas burner camping gas stove thing which allowed us to heat some water.  We have a gas fire but it is super intelligent and needs electric to start and can sense if there is none.  What was really galling was that we would have made a lot of electricity today but because we had no power this wasn't recorded and fed into the grid.  On that subject we have had our electricity bill for December and January and it was 25 euros and we still have some electric in the bank.

Our plans to have a lovely Sunday lunch went out of the window obviously.  The electric did come back at around 4pm and so by the time we had got ourselves sorted it was getting late and we were hungry so we simply heated up the leftover chili we had had the night before and threw on some cheese and did garlic bread and it was bloomin' lovely!!!  

We had had a productive day inspite or maybe because of the powercut but I will report on that in greater detail tomorrow.