We had a big storm blow through and move on last night. I was volunteering at the Morris Theater, where we had a sadly small audience, when the power went out about an hour into the show — I gave out free tickets to the few people there and shooed them out into the storm. It was an impressive storm, too. Sheets of rain crashing down, non-stop lightning, gusting winds, the usual midwestern chaos. I gave a couple of our volunteer concessionaires a drive home, which was more intense than I expected. The streetlights were out, the rain was so heavy that I had less than a car’s length of visibility, so I was doing about 10mph, and had to periodically stick my head out the window (and get drenched) to see where I was going.
It was so bad that when I got home, a panicky young Hispanic gentleman ran up to me from his car and asked where there was a place of safety for his family. I steered him to the hospital emergency room, about 2 blocks away, and recommended the well-lit waiting room with functioning internal lights. My house was pitch black inside.
So this morning we got up to inspect the damage. There wasn’t much. The tall weeds in our backyard were flattened, but surprisingly, the tall Mexican sunflowers Mary had planted were doing fine. Mary had told me that I had to participate in the Urban Butterfly Initiative’s Big Day by photographing butterflies. Yesterday, that would have been easy, we had swarms of butterflies everywhere.
Today, I think they’d either been blown away or were in shock. I found one.
I also found a sad looking drone fly hiding under a leaf.
I checked out our resident Argiope. She was fine, although the tall stems she usually used for her web were bedraggled and crushed down low.
Maybe the butterflies will be back tomorrow, or maybe the butterfly season is over.
I remember finding a tree covered in Monarchs one fall. Just the one tree and no other.
Waiting for a cold front to turn the winds around from the usual 10-20 mph from the south.(This being Oklahoma where the wind…)
Sadly, a golden opportunity was missed. You could have used the power failure as an excuse to get in front of the audience for an off the cuff spider lecture. I know I would’ve enjoyed that had I been there.
Seriously though, our midwestern summer storms are nothing to sneer at. Earlier this summer we had a huge storm come through northern Wisconsin. There were dozens of old pines blown down in our area alone, one that was at least 3 feet in diameter was ripped apart by a microburst that twisted the trunk and tore it apart, leaving a spike of wood 12 feet tall. We had no power for 30 hours