Oh, the memes: When a large tree limb crashes through a Sisters home’s roof — and lands in the toilet bowl

(Adding video, interview)

Nobody was hurt, that's first thing - and then, the laughs just happen

SISTERS, Ore. (KTVZ) – Sisters resident Matt Houston, his wife and their two dogs are all OK – that’s the first thing everyone wants to know before they say "wow," laugh and shake their heads at what you might call Mother Nature’s hole in one: a large, heavy tree branch that crashed through their roof -- and right into an upstairs toilet bowl.

A scary middle-of-the-night shock, for sure, and no doubt a sizable repair bill or two to come. But nobody hurt, just jolted awake by a loud crash around 2:40 a.m. Tuesday when the heavy, wet snow from an overnight storm, combined with windy conditions, just proved to be too much for one large limb atop the tree by his house.

“People don’t realize: When an object that weighs who knows how much – that big a branch atop a tree that hits our house, it sounds like you got hit by a mortar,” Houston, a work-at-home mortgage lender, recounted Tuesday evening, after an arborist came out and did a “great job,” and before Wednesday’s visit by the roofers.

“It knocked pictures off the wall,” he said. “There were chunks of the toilet seat down the stairs that ricocheted off the wall.”

But where and how it landed ... not just the odds, but the what-ifs come quickly to mind.

Houston told his friends it was the upstairs third bathroom his daughter used when she visited over the holidays. "It would have killed somebody," he said, as the arborist said it probably weighed 200 or 300 pounds.

And when you post a picture of the unusual damage on Facebook, of course your friends first express relief you’re all OK.

But some can’t stop there.

“The memes you could make with this,” one wrote, quickly adding, “Glad all is safe.”

Then there are the somewhat inevitable bathroom jokes.

“What did you eat?!?!” one asked.

Houston joked back about “that cereal that looks like little tree branches.”

Oh, and a “cheese log.”

And if you were wondering, Houston did answer a question many couples might ask.

"The lid was down -- and the limb torpedoed right through it, shattering it into pieces."