Clean-up

Troy and I spent most of the day cleaning up the yard.  What initally looked like a quick clean-up turned out to be quite a lengthy job getting all the leaves out of the pool and picking up hundreds of branches off the grass so that the lawn mower doesn't choke when I go to cut the lawn.  The forecast was accurate in terms of the timing and direction of the storm.  Flooding was pretty extensive in places but the winds were less than predicted, thankfully. 

It's nice to have trees for shade over the pool but this is the negative .

So Hurricane Irene turned out to be a lot less ferocious than we expected.  We did some home churching (a good sermon from Tim Keller - a Presbyterian minister in Manhattan), and Troy and I re-watched the Jim Elliott story which is the account of the American missionary who with four colleagues brought the gospel to the Aucas in the 1950s, a very inspiring story.   

Why a blog?

People start a blog for all sorts of reasons.  Authors like to share their ideas, artsy folk like to showcase their latest creations, others like to philosophize on certain topics, the politically minded find it a good medium to disseminate their views, etc.  My purpose is primarily to keep in contact with family and friends probably more through photos, hence the title.  I don't anticipate expounding the benefits of studying Latin or listening to a lesser known composition by Arvo Part or home schooling your children although they may all be worthwhile topics for discussion.  I also don't plan to do a weekly post, just whenever I feel have something worthwhile to share. 

It's Sunday afternoon and the day of Hurricane Irene that was forecast to hit mid morning.  Most churches cancelled their services including ours and major highways were closed.  NYC shut down its entire public transport system.  We filled the bath with water, took all our furniture off the deck, filled bags of dirt to put in front of the garage to prevent flooding, made sure we had batteries for torches, etc.  We were told it was pretty likely we would lose power for several days.  So far we have got through the storm pretty lightly.  The subsequent photos show more photos of the backyard with plenty of twigs and leaves but no untoward damage..