Our world today, a river runs through it

A hot summer doesn't necessarily mean a dry summer on the Canadian prairie. Hot weather can bring with it thunder, lightning, and torrential rain, lasting for a few minutes, a few hours...or a few days.
I've only had to water our yard once this year, and it is already August. We've had plenty of rain, perhaps too much rain. One corner of our concrete storage cellar had damp spots already last month, and there was water in our sump pump at that time, too.
Today it rained again, and more rain is in the forecast for this evening. It might happen, it might not. This is Alberta, where any weather can happen at any time of year, where we've watched the outside temperature rise at midnight in the winter...visibly rise on the thermometer, and watched trees break due to the weight of snow in the month of May.

I took this one through the rain on the window near my computer.

Then the rain stopped, so I went outside to get a photo of the water  in our cul-de-sac.

Almost the same view as the top photo, taken from outside.

Taken from inside: our back yard greenery.

The real story for us (because radio and TV have already dealt with this year's flooding in nearby Medicine Hat, and in Calgary) involves the branches hanging down in the last photo. We have two of these big cottonwood (poplar) trees close to the house, and despite their historic habit of dropping branches when they don't get enough water, they are dropping branches despite all the recent rain, probably because of winds coming from the northeast, instead of the southwest (which the trees are used to).
We recently watched as several men with very impressive equipment—a cherry-picker (not to be confused with a machine that picks cherries) and a chipper (not to make french fries) and a grapple (which is not fruit juice) cut down the huge old birch tree next to the house you can see on the left of the first and third photos above.
Shortly after that, we were told by a tree-cutting friend that we need to hire similar equipment to take down our two big poplars because they've become so tall, with so many dead branches, that they pose a serious threat to our house as well as to power lines serving the neighborhood.
The rain stopped and through my window I can see another movie title (A Patch of Blue) to the southwest. Time will tell what the weather will do but, for now, our dog Lindy is glad there's no thunder.

Truck with lift and (at rear) chipper

Posted for
Our
World
Tuesday

Photos at right
and below
from

http://www.riteenterprises.com/

65-foot lift (which I call a cherry-picker)

Stump-grinder (at left)

Loader (which I call a grapple) lifts large pieces of tree trunk