Raleigh, North Carolina This is the one day it snowed in Raleigh in 1998. Overall Raleigh is a nice place to live with a lot more job choices than Syracuse. The weather is mild (except when a hurricane blows through), there's lots of trees and greenery, lots of greenways and parks, and great shopping. The schools are good, though maybe not quite as good as in New York, and the traffic is a mess. The greatest irony, though, is despite having among the highest physician per capita ratios in the United States, the healthcare here generally sucks. Compared to New York, it's next to impossible to get an appointment and when you get one, you're treated like a sick cow.
Hurricane Fran '96 Eleven days after moving into this house, we were almost blown away by Hurricane Fran. I've lived in Raleigh since 1970 and never saw anything like this before. This picture was taken 2 days afterwards, which is how long it took for us to clear things up enough to get a view of the house again! Even more damage was in the back where we think a tornado must have formed downhill from our backyard. Twenty trees fell in our 1/3 acre lot.
Here's a view of some of the trees that fell on the back of the house. Again, things have been cleared up enough to even take the picture. On the morning after the storm, I had to saw my way through trees and limbs just to get out the door. The tops of those trees extended over the roof into the front yard. We had a lot of help from our friends and new neighbors cutting up logs, moving branches to the street, and finding a crane to lift the trees off the house.
This is our friend Jerry, the forester, who came over to help us out. Jerry lost his logging truck to Fran's destruction. In this picture, he's about 2 stories up in fallen trees at the level of our deck over the back yard. Behind him is a huge tangle of fallen trees and their branches.
And here we are in the front yard. The house is behind the fallen root ball.
At the Park Here comes trouble...I wonder what's in the white bucket... These kids are up to something... And Here trouble is...It's a FROG! Yes, it's a frog. They caught it in the back yard and felt compelled to free it in a nearby lake.
We painted Painted the house in February '02
Home / Feb. 23, 2002
