Ear, Storm, Tree: A Non-Knitting Post

Well, this morning I took the last of my antibiotics, and my ear is still infected. In fact, I'm having a hell of a time hearing out of my left ear. I can't tell which direction sounds are coming from, or how far away they're originating. I keep having to ask people to repeat themselves. And on top of that, I've got a persistent ringing in that ear. Blech.

Because that ear also hurts, I've been sleeping on my right side. And with one ear gone deaf/ringing and the other pressed to my pillow, I slept right through the gargantuan storm that passed through Lexington last night. I woke up around 1:30 and noticed that it was raining really, really hard, but I went right back to sleep. It wasn't until I left for work this morning that I fully appreciated the magnitude of the storm. There were twigs and small branches all over the parking lot at my apartment complex, and in the road on the way to work, and even a few medium-sized branches in yards along the way.

I sometimes sneak into work the back way, going down a side street to an alley in order to avoid some of the worst campus traffic. Well, as I approached the side street, I saw that there was a police car with lights flashing parked crossways, blocking the road. There was half a tree in the road ten feet behind the car. So I continued down the street to go in the driveway of my office--only to be met with caution tape blocking the driveway. Crap!

There's no easy way to go around the block I work on, so I made a wide circle down some back roads and snuck through the parking lot of the seminary down the road. I finally made it to the alley and got to my office. This is what I saw:

The building on the right is my office. The poor building on the left is student apartments. Happily, it looks like the falling tree only damaged the roof and the gutters--it doesn't look like the actual structure was affected. It completely missed our building. This is not a small tree--if a person tried to wrap their arms around the trunk, their hands wouldn't meet on the opposite side. I have to be honest; I've been waiting for this thing to fall since I started here. It's always swayed alarmingly in the wind. But it's still sad to see it fall. Rest in peace, tree.