$300 I did not plan to spend today

It's April. It's Texas. It's storm season. Last week there was a huge one that wreaked havoc all over the city. Trees and fences were down all over. Power was out, including signal lights the next day. We barely woke up and were clueless to the intensity of the storm. Last night there was another storm. It was earlier in the evening so we actually knew about it and I came home a little early from a girls night to make sure I avoided the hail. There was rain, there was wind, we saw no hail in our neighborhood. We thought it was no big deal again.

WRONG!

When we let Hooligan out we saw that our Bradford pear in the back yard had split in half with the fallen half leaning on our roof. The broken part is covering the window over the bed in our room where Sam and I sat from about 9pm on working on our computers and watching the news about the storm. How in the world did we not know that a tree had fallen on our roof and that there were branches literally inches away from crashing through the window, sending glass onto our sleepy heads?

I was really sad because this is basically the only tree in our backyard. We have two crepe myrtle trees up against the workshop but they have a fungus this spring that I fear will mean we have to cut them down this year too. This tree was great for shading about 80% of the yard for Katherine and the kids to play in. We have a chain link fence between our yard and our neighbor's yard and he had to cut down his one tree last year so now it looks pretty open and barren.

You can see what a great climbing tree it was. Nathan enjoyed it this February but now Katherine will never get to climb the tree. Katherine was quite distraught over the tree. She is very empathetic and could tell that mommy was sad. Therefore she was sad too. We spent about 45 minutes sitting in a lawn chair, watching the workers carefully cutting the tree to pieces. She kept saying things like, "Tree fall down. Tree on house. Men fix it. Mommy sad, very sad." Luckily it appears that there is no roof or gutter damage and if I had to choose a tree to lose I would prefer it be this one to one of the oak trees in front.
Now our yard looks so desolate. The stump will be ground later this week. On a positive note, we now have plenty of firewood for the next few years. Good bye tree!

My family has bad luck with trees. Some of you may remember that my parents lost a tree last year too. They live in an area with huge trees and theirs was one of the largest on the street. A week after my dad's heart surgery there was a wind storm that was the death sentence to a tree with a rotted trunk. It fell on the street, their house and several other trees. Here are a few photos from last years tree incident.