“Do not meddle in the affairs of Garden Gnomes, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

We got hit by Sandy, and lost power for a little bit. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant, but we got off a lot lighter than a lot of people, so we're thanking our lucky stars for that.

Lily has always been very literal minded. From the point when she was able to talk well enough to have a discussion with me, she's always been able to articulate that she understands that the people on TV are performers playing a role, that nobody has super powers and that special effects are used to make it look like they do.

Despite this, she sometimes comes up with a memorable turn of phrase. During a storm when was three years old, she said,  "The rain sounds like pebbles falling on the ocean floor." I wasn't expecting her language to be so metaphorical at her age.

The rain got heavier that night, and she was worried that it might storm. She said "Sometimes I think that thunder sounds like a dinosaur roaring up in the clouds and I get scared by that. I know it's not really a dinosaur, but I still get scared."

She fell asleep on Monday before we lost power and before the wind really picked up. She came into our bedroom, and here's where accounts differ. I'm a deeper sleeper than either of them, so I'm usually the groggiest for one of this midnight visits, but I swear that Lily said, "I'm very scared, because it sounds like the winds are saying 'You must chooooooooooooooose!", but Lily and Jen says that she each said something entirely different, that it sounded like teenagers on a roller coaster all going "Oooooooooooo!"

Since they both insist that they never heard that former phrase before I mentioned it, I think I must have been partly awake and I must have incorporated what I was dreaming to what Lily said.

I remember when I took Taekwondo as a kid that I was disappointed in how mundane the names for the maneuvers were. I grew up with the Shaw Brother chop-sockies, so I was expecting to learn things like the Dim-Mak, the Tiger Uppercut and the Icy-Fire jab and I got the inside-to-outside block and the front snap kick and the double jump front snap kick.

So when Lily goes on to develop her own martial arts style, I don't know if it will be composed of maneuvers she'll call Laser-Hyperdrive Exploding Head No-Shadow kicks or with techniques with prosaic names that could have come from the the monosyllabic judge from Karate Champ. "Half. Point."

Like I said up above, it was inconvenient, but not terrible by any stretch of the imagination, and we were very lucky. I don't even think we had any spoiled food.

My grandmother still lives on her own nearby. She's one of those tough old ladies who's going to outlive everyone, but she is getting up there in years, so we decided to check in on her.

This is what she saw when we pulled around the corner.

My father said that he happened to be in the house making a call from the second floor when the tree came down. He said that he was keeping an eye on it and that it was swaying back and forth, and then he realized that it had stopped with the back and was all the way forth and coming down right at him.

No one knows what it's like To be the bad gnome To be the sad gnome Behind blue eyes.

It's actually not nearly as bad as it looks. I guess the weight must be very evenly distributed, because even the drainpipes are barely damaged. For the brief time we were at my grandmother's, we were approached by wandering bands of tree-removal technicians, so at least she won't have trouble finding someone to get rid of it.