Ike hits Indiana

Ah, back online again. On Sunday Mom wrapped up her visit and left after lunch. Mary went down for her nap. John's Mom was planning on coming over after dinner to help with evening chores and getting the girls to bed. I was counting down the hours until John got home and things were 'normal' again. Mary got up from her nap, and we turned on Sesame Street. It was starting to get windy. I knew it was going to be some heavy winds and possibly rain, but I figured it just meant an afternoon inside instead of outside. Then the power went out. Then the phone went dead. My cell was dead too. Ugh. The winds were amazing. The entire house was shaking. We played in the hallway, but it was so dark. So we played in the kitchen where we could get to the hall in a couple seconds. The wind just kept blowing. I could hear things (trees, limbs, debris) crashing down all around us. I looked out and the lawn chairs had been blown over. I saw a corn husk go flying by, but all the fields next to the house are soybeans this year. Finally the phone came back. I was in touch with John's Step-Mom and his Mom too. Both were willing to help, but it wasn't like they could do anything. I thought we were safe. John's Mom had power and said she'd bring dinner over. So Mary and I played. Eleanor slept. The wind kept blowing. I think I've read reports of it being 70mph in the area, though I never checked the local paper. The strange thing was that it didn't let up. It blew like that for 3 hours.

Finally, it stopped. But the power was still out. That was fine, as it was almost bedtime for Mary anyway. The next morning, still no power. The yard was amazing. Here's the aftermath.

Looking into what's left of my hosta garden:

A view from the side:

Check out how the top of the tree fell and landed on the other tree (which is the tree the dove had her nest in earlier this summer).

We found out Wednesday that this limb knocked down the power line.

So after calling the power company many times trying to even get through to report our outage, they finally came on Wednesday afternoon. Their tree guys cut down several more trees that were in danger of falling the next time there's heavy winds. We were so excited that we'd have power again. But Wednesday evening came and went and we were still in the dark. Finally, Thursday about 9am it came back on. I think this has been the longest week of my life.

There are actually more limbs/tree tops down than that. And a million sticks. Right now we aren't going to mess with them until the power company's tree service comes back to pick up what they chopped down. I guess the good thing about all this is that we will have plenty fire wood.