A powerful storm blew through Chelsea early Tuesday morning, leaving downed trees and power outages in its wake. The power didn’t fail on this side of town, but several trees fell on the road and a significant part of one tree fell in the yard.

The bad news: that one tree decided to fall on the shed.

The tree cracked in half on the peak of the shed, leaving a mess on both sides of the building.

It also brought down the power line running from the house to the shed.

That not-quite-like-new object is a porcelain insulator. As you can see, it broke when it was ripped off the shed. When he started working on restoring the power line on Friday, my dad visited one store to find a new insulator. Then he went to another. And another. At the fourth store, he found the last two insulators in stock (after being told he should just go ahead and bury the line).

The moral of the story is this: if you need a large screw-in porcelain insulator, search the internet. (Or, if you’re interested in turning a cheap, fairly simple project into a more expensive, labor-intensive project, just go ahead and bury the line.)

Here he is stringing the wire through the newly-installed insulator:

As I said, the bad news from the storm was that the tree fell on the shed. The good news: the shed stood firm against the tree’s assault. The only real damage was a small hole poked in the roof. The chunk of tree that pierced the roof stayed in the hole:

How powerful was the storm? Well, take a look at this photo:

I’m standing under an oak tree. The branch in the foreground is from the elm tree that fell on the shed; what’s left of the tree is visible behind the shed. That branch blew across the whole backyard and driveway to end up where it did.

Here’s another example of the power of the storm:

To the great disappointment of young thrill-seekers everywhere, the slide is now back to normal.

My dad enjoys good chainsaw time, so he fired up his saw and got to work on the debris.

When he’d made the necessary cuts, he gave the retired tree a tug and watched it slide off the shed to the ground.

Of course, while all that hard work was happening, the cats were…

…doing what cats do.