I’ll have more pictures on flickr as soon as I can upload them (flickr’s being a bitch right now), but here’s the tree that almost fell on my house new year’s day (click the pic for detail).

We had what is, for northern california, a major storm come through new years eve. Major winds and flooding rain (I’m glad I live in the foothills, no flood watch within miles of me – it’s still pissing down as I type this). We woke to power out new year’s day, but then about 9:30 am our neighbor came to the door and said “Did you see your tree?”

We didn’t even hear it fall. Missed my house by a few feet. You can’t really get the scale of this tree from the picture, but it goes way past what you see here.

No one was hurt, and the cars that are usually parked here were missed completely. The only damage is to my fence and the play structure in the back yard.

The phrase dodged a bullet comes to mind. My kids and my friends kid were playing on the other side of that chimney you see in the picture when the tree went down. This could have been a very different entry if the wind had shifted a little.