Yes! We survived Hurricane Ike, and it was crazy. It's going to take a long time for this area to be back to normal. The winds started in the evening on Friday the 12th, and lasted till the afternoon on Saturday. Ike made landfall in Galveston, about 70-80 miles away from our house at about 2 am on the 13th. The wind and rain was so scary. We had the kids sleep in our room at the side of our bed (on the opposite side of the room from the windows). It was so hard to sleep that night. I kept waking up and watching the news to see what was going on. The power went out at about 4 am (I think). We are some of the "lucky" ones...our power came back on this past Friday morning...so we only had 6 days without power. So many people don't have it yet. We were also lucky that nothing happened to our house...just a few boards loose on the fence. I was really worried about this big tree in the neighbors backyard...but somehow it stayed put. And here's another lucky thing-somehow Houston had an unprecedented cold front come in last week so we didn't all die of heat exhaustion...it was actually quite pleasant outside.When we first looked out the window it didn't look like things were too bad...we saw a tree down across the road and some damage to our neighbors garage.
Later in the afternoon when the wind and rain had died down some I decided to venture out to my friends house a block down. That's when I started to see how bad Ike actually was. Trees were down all over the place, lots of them on houses...and that's just in our neighborhood, it was so much worse elsewhere. (I had to borrow the tree picts from some friends blogs just so I could show how it looked around here)
I'm just grateful that we don't live on the coast.
We lost a lot of food from our fridge and freezer...that was sad. But hey, the first few days were sure did eat well-lots of bbq with friends, family and neighbors! I also learned that you can cook more than just meat on a barbeque...like pizza and nachos. Yum yum. I was also lucky to have a friend with a generator that let me put some of my meat in her freezer so I didn't have to lose it. It was a little bit stressful trying to get ice to keep our other food cold. As you might imagine...it's hard to find when there are no stores open.The kids dealt with things pretty well...except for the part when Hailey threw up a few times during the hurricane. They got a little scared during the crazy thunder storm the night after Ike hit-the lighting was hitting really close by. They loved playing with the neighbors and really enjoyed having their dad around for a few extra days. (His building at work lost it's roof to the storm). The weather was so comfortable that we were able to go on walks all week long.
I'm getting tired of this post because it is getting so long...so I guess I'll wrap it up. I'm just glad that even with how huge this storm was, so many lives were spared and people are being friendly and working together to get things back together again.This isn't my house or anything...I just liked seeing the flag up and flying the day after the storm.
