I'm pretty sure many of you are asking yourselves, what Diabolical Catastrophe could have caused the Golds such Monumental Inconvenience (not sure about the correct punctuation, here). Read on.
Last Friday morning, as I was outside scooping scarce snow to keep food cold, I heard the sweet sound of a chain saw! Glorious music to my ears! Popped on a jacket, and went to look for the source. Just beyond the east boundary of our property, there were four guys in orange helmets working on The Problem.
A 60-or-so-foot Ponderosa Pine had been blown over on to a power/phone pole a week earlier (but hadn't actually knocked the pole down).
When I arrived, they had thrown a very long rope/saw over the trunk some 40' in the air, six feet, or so, above the top of the pole, and were topping the upper 20 feet of the tree. No time to go back for the camera, as I watched the upper third of the tree fall to the ground. 
I ran to the house, and returned with the camera to take these pictures (you might have to double-click on them to see what's going on). They installed three sets of pulleys in other trees, threw a long rope around the top of the offending tree and through the pulleys, tightened it, and then began to cut the base of the pine with chainsaws. It took about two hours, but, finally, the tree, bounced onto the power and phone lines (somehow, not breaking them!), and then, the remaining 30 feet of tree fell heavily to the ground. I'm a tree-hugger from way back, but it was a rare one I was willing to see fall--my hair was dirty, after all. The neighbors watching from the other side (the ones with the real noisy generator) and I cheered as it went down.
The tree guys (from Redding) told me that the damage to the transformer appeared to be minor, and that PG&E shouldn't have any trouble getting it working, again. Whenever they got around to it. Coming back from dinner, around 7, (a bit earlier, we'd seen the power trucks from Santa Maria--they had already been working in San Raphael for a week before responding to the call to come help in the foothills), the porch lights were on to greet us!
