Windstorm of the Century

Having finally recovered from my death defying Woman flu, it was bagging day. One of the local grocery stores arranges with local groups to have people do the bagging (4 per 2 hour shift x 2 shifts/group) to earn $300 for your group. I was on the morning shift. Very quiet at first but man was it fun and definitely over too soon. This same store allows Customers to put their receipts into a large selection of numbered boxes (Pickleball is #128) and at the end of the cycle (don't know how long a cycle is) they pay 1% of the receipt totals to the group. You can see the receipt boxes in the distance just to the right of my head as people exit the store (white).

Pickle bagger extraordinaire (again, thanks Mum)

It has been raining cats and dogs here for several days and Friday we had a major windstorm. The combination, of course, is deadly. The power was out all across Vancouver island, Gulf Spring Islands and into the interior of BC there were widespread power outages. They are calling it the storm of the century, apparently it is a rare occurrence in these parts, we'll see about that.

Susan & Reuben had a tree fall on Susan's car. We went to visit them after speaking to Susan on the phone and she sounded so distraught so we took their gifts to them - which we had planned to give them today (they've invited us for supper tonight), in an effort to cheer them up and we stayed and chatted for an hour or so. Hope it helped. When we were leaving I was looking at this tree on her car, which just grazed the house enough to take down the gutters but doesn't appear to have damaged the house at all and I realized, if the car hadn't been there the tree would most definitely have damaged the house.

Susan's former car with their current home on the right

Salt Spring Island was a right state. Trees were down everywhere, a lot of them had fallen on power lines, I took a sampling of pics to show this and roads were covered with limb debris.

Using a snow blade to scrape the tree bits off the roads

One of the couples in the campground are building a tiny house on the south side of the island so we drove down there to see if they were okay or needed any help but no one was there. Took plenty of pictures of what crews were having to deal with along the way.

A lot of trees in several clumps had to be cut to clear the roadways

All along the roadways there are downed trees to be seen everywhere

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Tree on a power line

Our power went out Friday at noon, and we discovered after a couple of hours that our Generator needs servicing, fortunately we have a large battery bank and we were able to just unplug a few things and once the genny died we ran the engine to recharge the batteries. Fortunately our power was restored last night (9pm ish) by these hard working heroes who are still hard at it getting everyone back 'online'. 

The Power Heroes

Today I am going across to do the laundry by myself, I have some last minute Xmas shopping to do and I'm praying that everyone else has theirs done so I can have the stores all to myself.... What?,  it could happen. LOL