Ike finally hiked

Ok, so before I begin my Post Ike recap, here are some pictures from the storm. I'm sure that they're about as exciting to you as watching someone's grainy, car-sickness-inducing Disney World vacation video, but humor me a little. The above picture (which you may have already seen) was taken before the storm, after Kevin had finished boarding up the house. That window is one of our master bedroom windows. Please note the meter box, securely fashioned to the side of the house and the two trees to the right, in their full-upright and locked position.

And...this is what we awoke to (not that I actually slept the night of the hurricane). Those are the trees outside of our bedroom window--thankfully they fell away from the house. If you look right next to the white porch column, that S-shaped doohickey is our weatherhead, which attaches to the meter box. All of that was dangling, decidedly not attached to our house.
This is the tree across the street from us. The picture probably doesn't do it justice, to give you an idea of the size of it. The tree was laying in the street and blocked our street for most of the day after the storm. Most of the tree is gone now, but to give you some more perspective, the trunk is still in place and has multiple wounds on it, where various tree trimmers have tried and failed to saw through it to remove it. It's a massive tree. I have lots of other pictures of the aftermath, but I won't do that to you because I value you as readers of my blog. To sum up the storm: It was bad, but now we're ok...we were especially ok once we saw this just this past Saturday morning:
The power company convoy in front of our house! Thank God. If you look closely in the distance of the picture, you can see the piles of debris (mainly carpet, padding, sheetrock and wood trim) that's piled up on the curb throughout our neighborhood. Many, many homes got flooded either during the hurricane, or--even worse--during the cool front that blew through the day after the hurricane. I can't tell you how thankful I am that we didn't get flooded.
This is our new utility pole being delivered to our backyard. The old one was splintered off about 3/4 of the way up like someone's old, tarter-encrusted toothpick.

So, in a nutshell--what would that be, 15--close to 16 days without power? We lost power late on the evening of Sept. 14 and just got it back last night (Sept. 28). Any way that you look at it, it wasn't a walk in the park, but we're back and I am so happy. Here are a few things that I learned throughout this ordeal:

1. Your bathroom gets very dirty when you don't have lights in there and are only showering, washing your face, etc by flashlight. When I went in the bathroom last night and turned on the lights...holy fraternity house, Batman! Yuck. I might have to hover on my own toilet until I work up the energy to clean in there.

2. Generators are a great thing to have--especially if you live anywhere where you're threatened by a lack of power for extended periods of time, due to weather or whatever other tragedies could cause this malady--BUT, man are they loud! If I never hear the drone (or smell the fumes) of a generator again, it won't be soon enough. By the way, if you're in the market for a generator, now would probably be a great time to pick up a gently used one in the Houston area.

3. It's amazing how far optimism, gratefulness and a positive attitude can get you in times of crisis (case in point: Jenny "camping" in her home for 2 weeks) but there's only so far a tired, sweaty, grumpy, pregnant woman can be pushed before she almost goes postal on her family. Luckily, I didn't get to that point until about 5 hours before our power was restored yesterday. Sorry again, Kevin. Love ya! *Muwah!*

4. Never take for granted that you can walk into your grocery store and get what you need. Both before, during and after this fiasco, our grocery store shelves have been alarmingly bare. I went last night, to get a few things, once our fridge was safely back up and running and all of the things that people obviously threw out during the outage were gone from the shelves (namely, mayo). It's very odd (and unsettling) to see empty shelves at a grocery store.

5. Kids spend way too much time inside the house in this day and age. During the outage, we saw more kids outside playing, riding bikes, at the park, then we even knew existed! It was very sad actually, to see families spending time with each other outside, at dusk; visiting with neighbors on the porch; etc., during this power outage because it's something that you just don't often see anymore.

6. I don't see how parents managed without air conditioning in the past. Poor Anna has had a pesky rash throughout this whole ordeal, initially brought on by heat. There is, however, nothing sweeter than the smell of a sweaty toddler head in the morning.

7. You really lose touch with what's going on in the world when you lack internet and cable tv (all of the local channels--which is all we could get with our Jurica-engineered rabbit ears--were only showing "Hurricane Ike: The Aftermath"-type of specials). For instance, standing in line at the grocery store last night, reading the magazine covers, I read that Clay Aiken is gay. REALLLLY? Wow. Color me shocked. (sarcasm)

In a nutshell, I'm so glad that this ordeal is over and I'm so ready to begin enjoying my favorite time of year. I have a lot of Fall decorating to do around here. Last night, at the grocery store, I saw a lady with about 8-10 pumpkins in her shopping cart. I totally understood her logic. It just feels so nice to be able to think about decorating with pumpkins, while for the past couple of weeks, we've all been focused on just getting by. Late last week, I was resigned to the idea of having to get a second generator in order to run our Christmas lights this year, so things are definitely looking up! Thanks to everyone for your offers of places to stay and just general well-wishes during this time. We were very lucky and are even luckier now that it looks like it's finally behind us.