Ike Update...The Last...I Hope

I apologize for the silence for the last few days, but as expected, the power went out. It happened sometime during the night Friday night, when Ike was blowing his hardest. The wind was quite scary. I spent a fairly sleepless night listening for noises out of the ordinary that could signal problems. Then I was awake because of the heat in the house after power went out.

On the bright side, we woke up to much calmer weather Saturday morning. The worst had passed, and by late morning the rain was a mere drizzle and we were able to assess the damage. It was minimal, thank goodness. Our area and neighborhood fared quite well, much better than the scenes you have been seeing on the news.

Personally, we have some roof damage from the winds, but nothing that will leak during rains (this morning's thunderstorm tested that already). I am sure that our roof issues are very low on the priority list for repairs. We also had one small section of fence blow over and some minor damage to our air conditioner. Considering how bad things seem to have gone all over the area, we were very lucky. Even one of our neighbors had a huge section of their roof down to just plywood and already have six different leaks in the roof as a result. Another house in our neighborhood in the progress of being built, just a frame and plumbing, blew over entirely onto the (uninhabited) house next door.

This morning our power attempted to come back on. When Matt went outside to inform our neighbors who were enjoying a breakfast in the relative cool of their porch, he watched as a nearby transformer blew up, shooting sparks and bursting into flames. Coincidentally--or not--our power immediately went down again. That's when we made the decision to try a post-hurricane evacuation. We were tired of living like refugees on peanut butter and jelly and bottled water, unable to even shower and wilting in the heat.

We are now with my parents in Dallas, among many other refugees who got out before the hurricane. We have air conditioning here, as well as cold food and ways to heat food again. It's amazing how much you appreciate such simple comforts after living without them for a few days. Naturally we found out when we were nearly here that power had returned to our neighborhood sometime this afternoon, but we decided we would be better off staying put here until things had returned to a semblance of normal down there, when we could get things like milk at the grocery store again.

The boys are doing about as well as could be expected after the uncertainty of the past few days. They both slept like...well, babies through the hurricane but have had troubles napping every since because of the heat. Any little change from his normal routine, like not turning on his fan at naptime, has thrown Patrick into hysterics. The last hour of the drive today had both boys reaching their melting point, and all Matt and I could do was laugh at the simultaneous tantrums thrown by inconsolable boys in our backseat. What else was there to do?

And now we are just planning to sit tight for a few days. You can be sure we'll be watching the news carefully and talking to people from back home to find out when things in our area are back to normal. It will probably only be a few days for us, not the weeks or months like people who live farther south. I'm sure you will find out shortly after we get home and what we see when we get back there. Hopefully things will seem a little more normal then than they did when we left.