I swear to gosh, the wind has been so bad for the past twelve hours or so, with wind gusts up to 50 MPH, I expect to see Elvira Gulch go sailing past my front window at any moment, complete with bicycle.

Behind the house, I keep hearing the crash of various people's trash cans falling over. I looked out to see if ours were OK, and except for the recycle bucket, (which is halfway across the yard from the rest of the cans), everything's still standing. So far.

But I did notice a couple of large, square-sided trash cans right next to our back fence, on the outside. I wondered about the origin of those, but I didn't go down to investigate. A while later, I looked out, and they were gone -- their original owner, who I think lives in one of the houses on the street behind ours, had come to reclaim them.

Understand, these square-sided trash cans (and our square-sided recycle bucket) are not ROLLING to these new locations. They're SKIDDING there as the wind blows them around.

I honestly don't ever remember seeing wind this strong, sustained for this many hours, except when the frayed remnants of a hurricane make their way through the area. And even then, the wind we've got today is outdoing the majority of THOSE weather episodes.

I sure am glad the city came and removed the half-broken branch on our tree last summer. If that thing had still been on the tree, it'd surely have broken off and damaged goodness-knows-what by now. Shoot, it'd probably have blown most of the way to New Jersey by now.

I'm almost afraid to think of what the debris field will look like once the wind settles down. Last time we had weather that resembled this, I saw twigs and branches on our porch, and near our house, from types of trees that we don't even have on our block. Heck only knows how far they flew before landing around here.

For kicks, I turned the news on, and there's an awful lot of damage in this whole region. Trees coming down, power outages, roofs being damaged, and so on. Blah. This wind needs to go away.