Life on the knoll

Our farm is at elevation 2470 feet, on a small knoll, facing a valley that points south-southwest.  Most of our weather approaches from the west or southwest, gets funneled in the valley, then hits us hard, and it gets a bit windy sometimes.  How windy, you ask?

The gust needle on our expensive but accurate Maximum(tm) anemometer

Yes, that's eighty-five miles per hour, a peak recorded on Wednesday night at about 8 pm.  The constant speed was around sixty mph for about half an hour.
This wind came out of the west.  How could we tell?

That's the rope that held the bird feeder between the porch and a tree.  It's aligned almost exactly west. Sunrise revealed the not-unexpected:

A total of eight trees down in the pasture.  Fortunately for us, the power line is on the west side of the trees, so it's been spared this and other windstorms' damage.  We're never short of firewood.  On the minus side, we now need to re-shingle our roof.   Looking forward to talking with the insurance agent about that.
In all this chaos, the power went down a little before 8 pm.  As I've done ever since I bought it, I brought out the generator, and got ready to start it up in the morning if the power was still out.  And, as it's happened  in the four times previous to this, the power came back on in the dead of morning.  So, we still have a generator that we bought almost a year ago that has never been fueled up and started.  I think of it as sort of a talisman that guards us against long term power outages.