Hurricane Ike

Tree that fell on our trampoline Mitchell and Lukas on the new addition to the tramp
Results of our labors, thanks to Ike
Weird sky on the night Ike hit - pre-Ike
Our big tree- we're so glad it fell away from the house!
Not much of a root system for such a big tree! I think it's a sweet gum tree. The one that has those little spiky balls that fall all over the yard and bite your bare feet!

Some of our lovely plywood-boarded windows! Great job, B!
By now, you've all heard of the destruction and devastation that Hurricane Ike has delivered to the Texas coast. We've been blessed in our family that we're all healthy and well, and also that the hurricane didn't damage our home. We had a huge tree fall in the opposite direction of our house, onto our trampoline and onto/across our iron fence & into the forest out back; and we had lots of brush and tree limbs to pick up. And that's about it! Unfortunately, many of our friends, neighbors and ward members didn't have it so well!

Close to the end of last week, around Wednesday or for sure Thursday, we realized that Ike had moved slightly off of his previous course and was headed straight for Galveston, with the eye of the hurricane right around The Woodlands, Texas (our home!). It was to hit Galveston around midnight on Friday night/Saturday morning, and enter our area sometime close to 4am Saturday morning. Thankfully, we had learned from the previous big hurricane (Rita, 3 years ago) and from the constant counsel of our church leaders to "be prepared" for emergencies! Also, my mom has always been a person to have extra food & supplies on hand, so I'm sure I've learned a bit of my stockpiling from her! Thanks, Mom! Anyway, after a quick audit of supplies, I decided to run to the store for "just a few more things" on Thursday. A few weeks before, (and in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav and the rest of the hurricane season) Brian had taken off of work and we decided to splurge on a generator and a window air conditioning unit for the master bedroom, just in case - for hurricane season. This is something we'd been thinking/debating about buying for, oh, about 6 years now - ever since we've returned to Houston. Yay, Brian!

So on Thursday, I ran to Walmart with the rest of the surrounding population. I was looking for a few things like canned goods (Spaghettios, etc), Ramen noodles, water bottles, some milk, and a few more batteries...well, I've never seen such empty shelves in my life! I had to almost fight for the leftover cans of Spaghettios with Franks (I usually never splurge on the O's w/meat, but they were all that was left and they were gone except for about 8 cans!). I got 6 cans and returned the 2 that were slightly dented...no ramen was left on the shelves! It was wild. I ended up with a few extra canned goods and most of my other essentials. (If anyone has seen my pantry, they'd know that we have lots of canned goods, but you can never have too much, right? Esp. with 4 sons!). I also ran to Home Depot and Lowes (for extension cords, hurricane clips, chain to chain up the generator, etc), 3 auto parts stores for gas cans & a siphon - in case we needed to siphon gas from our SUV's, and I went to a few gas stations to fill up w/gas for the cars and for the gas cans (for the generator, etc). It took several stops to find a gas station w/a line that wasn't wrapped around the block several times or out of gas. I finally found a station which only had premium gas left, but that was ok w/me by that time!

That afternoon, the high school let out the students an hour early. I got the kids busy cleaning up the yard and bringing all the outside things inside. There was a lot to do! We put all the furniture, grill, pool things, toys, etc. into the garage. We took down the volleyball net and tied up the trampoline...we secured everything. Our big planters were taken in, along with the porch swing, benches, outdoor furniture, etc. We have lots of windows, and you never know what could fly through the house in a hurricane! Brian had cut plywood to fit all our back windows for Hurricane Rita 3 years ago, so he and the boys put up the plywood on all the windows. The kids were given a Hurricane Day for the next day - last Friday - so that the families could either prepare or leave town, as we were in the path of the hurricane. There was no way we were going to leave, as we remembered the traffic on I-45 when Rita came to town 3 years ago - major standstills and chaos (luckily, we didn't fight that mess then either).

A neighbor asked to park their friend's car (hot Corvette) under our carport - or porte cache' - so that, hopefully, no trees would land on it. So we had our 2 vehicles in the garage, a bunch of stuff in the other part of the garage, and 2 cars and a generator in the driveway. Brian chained the generator to a brick pillar in the driveway and locked it also.

We set up our master bedroom (1st floor) as our little command central, and put sleeping bags, an air bed, blankets and pillows on the floor. We pulled out a bunch of movies, and I also made a big basket full of batteries, flashlights, lanterns, games, and a case of bottled water. We also had our little emergency crank radio with us. We had a slumber party Friday night (and for about 3-4 nights after the hurricane) with all of us together in our bedroom. We were afraid for the kids to be upstairs in their bedrooms, just in case a tree fell on the house. We thought we were safer all together on the bottom level, esp. with plywood boarding up the windows. Parker and Brian wired up the house, with both fridges,the freezer, and our TV/DVD player connected to the generator with extension cords throughout the house.

We all went for a pre-hurricane walk that night. We walked around the neighborhood and out into some others, looking to see what types of preparations the other folks had done. Some had boarded up their homes and had brought in many things from their yards, and some hadn't. It was quite windy, and at sunset the sky was quite beautiful, a shade of red, almost. We watched movies 'til late at night and then tried to go to sleep. Around 11 or 12, the wind started whipping around and howling, and it started to rain. I think the fact that we'd boarded up the windows helped in blocking some of the noise, thankfully. Around 4-5am, our electricity went out. That was when the eye of the storm went over The Woodlands area. Lots of rain and wind; the trees were swaying to and fro. It was pretty scary! Jack the dog, sissy that he is, jumped up on the bed and tried crawling under my head to act as my new pillow, but kept crawling so soon I had to use his tail and rear end as my pillow. We finally put him in his wall-to-wall carpeted crate. He was happier there. And so were we!

The full hurricane hit around 6am and continued through the day. We had one huge tree fall, and lots of wind, rain and debris. We had a small leak in our master bedroom, which came from the upstairs porch rain water/wind evidently. Once Brian covered part of the porch with a tarp, the leak stopped. We dried it with towels, but it did warp a bit of our moulding at the bottom.

That morning, Brian started our generator and had the 2 fridges and freezer hooked up. It saved all of our food and we ate great! We cooked chicken and salmon for a few meals, and had some yummy spaghettios & pb&j sandwiches besides. I was a bit afraid that we might not have enough gas for the generator, depending on how much gas it used and how available gas would be. So I wanted to us to eat some meat from the freezer in case it went bad after all.

On Saturday night we had more big storms - lots of thunder and lightening. Brian and I woke in the night to listen to our emergency radio to see if there were any tornado warnings, b/c the storm was so severe. We didn't hear a warning, but from the looks of it, tornadoes probably visited the area also. We all camped out together again, for about the next 4-5 nights. Movies every night - not so bad. We worked on cleaning up our yard on Saturday and Sunday. We went for a walk on Saturday or Sunday to Lakeside Park and were so surprised as to the damage and flooding there! There were teenagers with rowboats floating around the basketball courts! (There's not usually any water in that area!). I'll post pics of that later - they're on my other camera. On Sunday, Brian and the boys joined with our ward for a work party to help some less-fortunate members who had trees fall on their homes. We were without power until Wednesday night, and our phones came back (mostly) on Thursday. Cell phone reception wasn't the greatest either - no real signals until Thursday and that was spotty. We'd heard that texting would be the best form of communication, but that didn't work for us. Maybe it was AT&T? But I think all the phone servers were about the same. Some of our friends still don't have power.

Our church still is without power, but Brian, Parker and Mitch went to another work party today to help clean up the grounds. They were joined by lots of folks, all helping to clean up. Also, they tried to help a few more families with tree damage and the like. We're working on cleaning up the rest of our yard, but we're so blessed with a small bit of damage; we're really thankful! Off to school for the boys on Monday. Did I mention that our trusty old Target store is no longer? Thank goodness we have a new one - with half power at this moment. The Target evidently got the roof blown off and had flooding problems, and is not to open any time soon. Shoot!