Our hurricane update

I have to admit - we probably weren't as prepared for this as we should have been. Afterall - we were in Tampa in 2004 for 3 hurricanes that affected the area. Each time, we had lots of canned foods and planned to heat them up with our fondue pot as well as lots of water. And each time, we never even lost power. When you go through that over and over, it is super easy to become complacent.

So for this hurricane, we filled one of our cars with gas. We filled the bottles we have saved with water. We made sure everything from our backyard was stored in our garage (thanks to some people from church who moved our giant grill that is way too heavy for a pregnant woman and a man recovering from abdominal surgery to move). But that is about all we did to prepare.

This was by far the worst natural disaster we have been through. We lost power around 11pm on Friday night. It flickered a couple times before it actually went out, but when it was out for 10 minutes without coming back on - we knew it was not coming back anytime soon. Throughout the night, the wind howled and I hardly slept. Around 5 am, both Justin and I couldn't sleep because the storm was so loud so we got up to check our house for any damage. The wind was still ferocious outside and the darkness made it really difficult to see anything.

Around 7, we could see outside that all of our trees were still standing, but the wind was still pretty strong. We checked out attic to make sure we couldn't see any leaks and then we each went back to bed for about an hour or so. When we woke up, we looked out again to see that one of our trees was leaning to one side. We got some rope from our garage and went out in the wind and rain to secure our tree.

By about 10 or so in the morning, it seemed that the storm had passed. We were able to actually go outside and look around. Our roof looks undamaged as far as we can tell and luckily the rope we used on our tree seemed to hold it up. Besides the fact that we had no power, we had no other damage. As we took a drive around our neighborhood, we realized how lucky we are. Lots of people had trees that had fallen over or snapped in half, lots of broken fences, damaged roofs, etc.

Without power, our house continued to get very hot and humid inside - not so great for two people in mine and Justin's situation (i.e. pregnant and recovering). As the day turned into night we hoped that a night breeze would come through our open windows. But that didn't happen - turns out all our windows are on the wrong side of the house. We also hoped that we would be awakened in the night by our lights turning on as the electricity was restored. Yet again, that didn't happen.

Instead we were awakened as a huge storm came through around 3:30 in the morning with lots of lightening and thunder. We ended up having to go through the house and clean up water that had come into our open windows. We were also quite upset to realize that another big storm meant it would take that much longer for us to get power restored.

Luckily for us, we have great family that really look out for us. My BIL had put his name down for a generator in Austin (even if we could have found one here, neither Justin or I could have carried the thing to bring it home and set it up). This morning he got the call that the generator could be picked up. Because electricity here was scarce, and gas stations that had elecricity didn't have any gas, Rick (and his nephew) brought us the generator and 15 more gallons of gas to keep it running. In addition, he brought the window A/C unit that he and Sherry bought a few months ago when their A/C was out for a few days.

As fate would have it, our electricy was back about 5 hours after getting our generator. We are glad that in the meantime we were able to cool down the family room in our house so it was actually comfortable as well as save most of the food in our freezer. We are also happy to have a generator for the future - you never know when we could use one again. And we are glad that we are going to be able to let Justin's aunt and uncle use our generator now since they have no power still and since they have no power they also have no water.

The past two days have pretty miserable, but we also realize how blessed we have been. Our house has no damage to it and the uncomfortableness of no power, although it seemed to last forever, was less than 48 hours.