My husband has been on vacation this month, hence the reasons why you haven’t seen many paintings here. If you’ve been following my sketches on my other blog, you have seen a few of the places we’ve hiked to, and what I sketched while hanging out on the patio with my Sweetheart. This past week we’ve had Hurricane Irene to deal with, and that sure packed a whallop around here. We are fortunate that our property survived quite well and we had no flooding in the house. We also managed to retain power almost the entire time. Here are some of my personal photos that show just a tiny portion of what happened around me.
Here’s a photo along Kaaterskill Creek in Palenville, by the Woodstock Avenue bridge, which gives an indication of the general road conditions following Irene. The creek makes a sharp turn here, and the power of the water against the bank collapsed an entire section of the roadway. A woman’s house along the creek washed away during the storm.

Our back yard started to fill up quickly when the storm hit:

We were fortunate that the house and septic were on high enough ground, and with good enough drainage around the house, to not be affected. Things have pretty much returned to normal for us here at home. To show how much water there was, here’s a photo of one of our streams now, with a “moderate-to-heavy” amount of water flowing:

Here’s the same stream just after the hurricane. The water had actually subsided a bit by the time I got out there to take this photo:

One of our small waterfalls is also a dramatic tale of what the storm brought. Here’s a photo from before the storm. You can see that the water flows only to the left side of those rock ledges:

Well, here it is just after the storm! There’s so much water here that you can’t even see the ledges at all! The stream couldn’t contain all the water, which is why it jumped the banks in the back of our property and flooded the yard.

I’m so thankful that we fared better than most of the folks up here in the Catskills. So many have lost everything. It’s a real tragedy. With the sun shining and the dog playing in the pools by the waterfalls again, it’s almost hard to believe that so many are left with no homes and nowhere to go.
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