I made it through the rain...

Or should I say - "I made it through the tropical storm..." 

Thankfully, we survived the storm with very little trauma.  Unlike most of our town - we never lost power (HUGE Yahoo!!!) and only have to deal with cleaning up one large branch and a million little branches strewn about the yard. 
It certainly could have been worse, so we're very lucky, and we certainly appreciate the fact that we made it through Tropical Storm Irene (which is what she was when she arrived in MA) unscathed.

Jim's relatives, who live in the same town as us, all lost power at various times during the day so they all (well, most of them) ended up at our house for a while, as darkness approached.  It's certainly no fun having to deal with losing your electricity (which we had to deal with over the winter), so I was more than happy to have them over.  Although we didn't lose our electricity, we did lose our cable, Internet, and phone - so my 'work from home day' is now a regular work day in the office....which is where I am right now.
Blech.

We have our monthly check-in with DCF today, so I'm unfortunately going to have to miss it, as I'm not at home.  Typically, I take a lil' break in my work day for the meeting - but that's not going to happen today.  Hopefully, they don't need me there, but if they do....we'll have to improvise!!

Here are a few picture of the crap we're dealing with in your yard.  As I said - it certainly could have been worse, so we're not complaining.  Well, we're complaining a little bit....it's still a total pain in the ass to deal with the clean up....but we're happy it wasn't as bad as it could have been. 

I hope you're all happy and safe, wherever you may be!!!!
xoxo

The back yard, littered with branches and all sorts of leafy debris...

Thankfully, this branch wasn't big enough to damage the fence....we had to deal with that two years ago, and it wasn't fun.

Jim is so annoyed about this....he takes great pride in the fact that our pool is SPOTLESS....but knowing him, it will be back to normal by the time I get home from work.  :-)