Surviving Hurricane Ike

This has been a very interesting week for us. Last Thursday we were supposed to leave and go to Brady and Natalie's home in Austin (Matt's cousin) while the hurricane had it's way with our home. But after listening to all the news reports and our neighbors we decided to hunker down and endure the storm. I know many of you were worried, but we made it out just fine. Fortunately we were not one of those people that were surfing on the roofs of their homes or paddling away on a liferaft. The media has a tendency to only show the worst of the hurricane and we are about and hour from the coast so we didn't have to worry about the storm surge. Hurricane Ike was the worst storm Houston has had since Alicia...in 1983. Go figure, that is happens on the week after we move here. Anyways, we stormed the nearest Target and stocked up on bottled water, tuna, and peanut butter. The wind and rain all started on Friday afternoon, we spent most of the day watching movies in our media room and unpacking. Then it started getting really noisy at about 8:30pm. We decided to go ahead and unplug everything and move boxes up to the 2nd floor, just in case it flooded a little. Matt kept going outside to look at the clouds and stuff, he's nuts! We decided to take our aerobed into the master bathroom, where there is only one window that is made of really thick glass. We then plugged in our phones and watched another movie on the laptop. We has our neighbor keep us posted on any tornado warnings because we forgot to get batteries for our radio. Then at around 12:30 am the power went out. I could here the wind barreling through our vents and the rain sloshing all over the house. I was scared. I kept a movie on for background noise while I went to sleep so I didn't have to listen to the loud gusts of wind and rain. I kept thinking that a tree would come crashing down on our house or something, but it didn't, thankfully. Then at around 4 am it got really quite. I thought, "Ah finally, it's over, that wasn't that bad". Then I fell dead asleep. Little did I know we were in the eye of the storm.

I heard that the second path after the eye was the worst part. I'm glad I was asleep so I didn't have to listen to it. We then woke up at around 10 am to a cloudy sky and drizzling rain. We went outside and looked around for any damages. There was debris everywhere. A tree fell on our back fence and broke it. A tree in our front yard was uprooted. But that was about it. We said a prayer thanking Heavenly Father for protecting us and our neighbors. Then we noticed that people were out driving around, so we decided to go out and see what Ike had done to rest of the town. None of the street lights worked, huge trees were snapped in half, a local bar was completely demolished and many people had tarps on there roofs due to leaking. It was both horrifying and amazing at the same time.

If you ever visit Houston the first thing you will notice is how friendly people are. Complete strangers say Hi and start up a conversation with you. The lady at the DMV shared her story of how she lived through Alicia and gave us advice on what we should be prepared for. I've seen families in public restaraunts holding hands around a table and saying "Grace". And the best part is they aren't Mormon. They are good Christian people who aren't afraid to show they believe in God. I love that. It's amazing to see how disasters bring people together. We had block parties almost everynight with our neigbors and got to know them all a little bit. Our neighbor Bill let us hook our fridge up to his generator so our food didn't spoil. Our other neighbor brought us some yummy bread, and Bill offered to let Matt borrow his chainsaw so he could cut the tree off our back fence, and then we come home and Bill is already doing it for him. We feel very blessed and know that we are where we are supposed to be.

Our power came back on the Wednesday after the hurricane. But many are still without. It was kind of nice not having power. We went to bed when it got dark and read a bunch of books and magazines. We talked more and watched a bunch of movies like Casablanca and Citizen Kane. Now we have internet and tv set up and Matt starts work on Monday. Back to normal life.

The local H.E.B. line for food and water. It went all the way around the corner.

Our fence and the tree that broke it.