WHAT A STORM!

Don't you just love the long lazy days of summer? Yessiree...we've been having those for the past week.

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Yesterday afternoon, while I was ripping out the nine patches to make other nine patches, I heard a flurry of activity at the humming bird feeder at the window....I looked up to see that the sky was darkening to the west!

Here is the storm coming on the first picture...I shouted to my sweetie to put his tools away as we had "a big one" on it's way.

I rushed to close all the windows in the sunroom, seven for sure right to the tops, the others were half way as the wind doesn't get to the north side much.

I had grabbed the camera so took this next on the deck

facing east as I was scrambling to cover the deck cushions.

The thunder was rolling in and we could hear it as it approached the island. The first clap shook the cottage. The dog, fearless little wonder, just rolled over and went back to sleep!

We were making sure that the windows were shut, praying that we wouldn't lose our hydro...(Canadian saying for power)

hoping that we had sufficently tied down the boats as the docks were really rocking by this point.

I couldn't get the large deck umbrella down, so my sweetie stepped out on the deck, the heavens opened up and he was drenched, but said afterwards that it's a good thing he got the umbrella down as it would have been ripped by the fierce wind!

So, he stepped into the cottage, dried himself off, and with the

lights flickering on and off, the thunder and lightning was so

loud...usually we get this kind of storm in the night...we were

looking out the windows watching the storm swirl around us

when we saw our neighbours deck chair floating by....then

another...

Of course I then went to the bedroom window, facing east and took this spectacular (don't ya think) photo of one of the chairs floating by.

Then, everything stopped....the sun came out, the lake calmed, the thunder could just faintly be heard over the Haliburton Highlands, and Algonquin Park which to the north and east of us!

My sweetie got into my boat, rescued the two floating chairs only to find that the other two chairs of the new neighbours had just ended up on their rocky shore line.

So into the water he had to go to rescue them and put everything in a safe spot.

Here's the two chairs on the rocks. No damage to any of the chairs, but I wasn't any help at all.....of course giving advice is what I do best anyway....so my sweetie put everything away and we both took ourselves back to our deck.

All of this storm took about 15 minutes....I can only imagine the time level people have for tornados. We had about 4 minutes to prepare from the time we saw the storm coming across the lake till it hit.

What amazed me was the lake! Our docks were rocking and rolling so much that we couldn't have gone on them to the

photo of the boat approaching the dock about 25 minutes after

it all passed!


The pic isn't the best as the sun was shining as we were coming back in.

Whew! what a day it was.

Today, we are in the low 70s F, to have a steady rain falling which has sent the heat wave on its way to whereever.

I'm working on my next series of nine patches to see how many I'll get done today.

Whew...another of my short blogs!