Motherf***ing nature can bite my motherf***ing ass!

Earlier in the day, we should have known an ambulance stopping out in front of our house asking for directions should have been the ominous sign of bad things to come! A quick and fierce thunderstorm rolled into the village tonight, some time after five. My wife and son were outside, cleaning out her car when the storm started. It started with a strong wind, leaves and small branches flew threw the air. They quickly ran inside, drenched. Some time later, my wife called out to me, "Why is that car parked out in front of our house?" I walked out the front porch and looked at them. A camper, being pulled by a black pick-up truck, had stopped out in front of our back yard. I couldn't get a good look of why they had stopped, so I came back inside and looked out the living room window to see if I could get a better view. A better view indeed! The top of a tree had snapped and fallen on my son's play structure! As may be able to see from the picture, it's huge - at least a couple hundred pounds. For assistance with determining the size, the play structure is somewhere near eight feet tall at the peak of the canopy and the treetop, I estimate, is over ten feet tall and just about a foot thick at the base. Luckily, there wasn't much damage. Here's a run down:

• The screws for the beams of the canopy snapped but the wood is still in good shape.
• The structure was moved about six inches; the anchors were ripped up but no physical damage to the structure itself.
• The swingset bar, installed in June, was just fine. Because the structure moved, the A-frame support moved a little but nothing broke.
• Subsequent damage was tolled on my yard as a result of dragging the treetop off the structure and back to the base of the tree it fell from. I also cut up my arms a little moving that damned thing.
• My grill cover was also ripped to shit. Somehow a limb tore the cover off the grill and stabbed it into the ground. Luckily the grill shows no sign of damage. Why was it over there you ask? Well, I moved it to the edge of my property to avoid the smoke from going into my home and my neighbors homes. I guess one way to look at it is that I now have plenty of firewood for winter grilling.

All in all, the thing I'm most pissed about is that I had to get wet and dirty when I moved the tree. I HATE getting wet, especially from cold rain!

Now I need to find my chainsaw... I think I misplaced it after the last zombie attack.