After Ike

Apparently Ike was not pleased that I connected his name with Eisenhower's nickname. Ike must be of Canadian descent, and believes Eisenhower was useless during WWII. (If you aren't a history nerd...ignore the last sentence and move on.)

Please bear with me if this seems like just a stream of consciousness...because it is.

I didn't realize hurricanes lasted so long. Ike got started around here at 7 or 8 Friday night and kept it up until nearly 11 Saturday morning. Even though we didn't go to bed Friday until past midnight, I slept through a lot of Ike; I love stormy weather anyway, and sleeping in stormy weather is just lovely to me. If it hadn't been for the plywood on our windows, I probably would have been much more scared and gotten much less sleep. I did wake up a few times during the night because y'all, that wind was loud. Look what it did to the stoplights:

My dad had drilled a 2-inch circle in a few of our plywood boards so we would be able to see out during the storm, and it was honestly amazing to see the force of the wind. Please do not confuse my thinking the force of the wind was amazing to watch means that I would ever be stupid enough to decide to sit out the storm in a building on a pier in Galveston like some people did. They'd better praise the Lord that they didn't die because of their stupidity (they were in the second floor of a little building on the pier...the bottom floor and the pier surrounding them were swept away during the storm, leaving them stranded on the pillings holding up the building.)

Our house made it through fine, but we lost a few trees, the roof of our green house, and all 3 fences. When we went outside after the storm passed, I lamented that our backyard is so big and has so many trees.
My family was not bad off. We had no electricity and we had to boil our tap water, but we had plenty of bottled water, ice enough in the freezers to keep our food for a day or two, no damage to our home, and enough money to buy a generator to save the rest of our food and run the tv. My mom got pretty talented cooking on our gas grill. My dad bought a generator Monday morning, which of course means we got power back Monday at 4:16pm. We were in the kitchen taking a break from cleaning up and heard what sounded like two gun shots. My mom got up to look out the window, and came back to sit down. She jumped out of her chair as if she had sat on a knife and pointed at this:

I honestly was giddy.

While my family was indeed fortunate (blessed's more like it) that our damage was only to the yard, other places did not fare so well. On Sunday, I almost cried when I saw the roof of our church, right over the sanctuary, had been badly damaged. This is the same church I've gone to since I was 2 years old, and where I will one day be married (you know, after I meet the guy, we date, and he proposes). Our sanctuary was absolutely saturated. We had to throw away over 50 Bibles and 100 hymnals from the pews, rip up the carpet, and get rid of the pews. And that's just the beginning.

And lest I depress you, there's been a lot of good to come out of this...like me getting two free days off work with pay. Tomorrow I'll return with my List of Silver Linings, but right now What Not to Wear is on.

Clearly I have my priorities straight.