Side Benefit of Moving from Texas to Ohio — Less Hurricane Impact. Right?

September 16, 2008

I’m still not entirely clear on how Ike managed to hit the entire state of Ohio harder than it hit Austin, TX, but that’s apparently what happened. Granted, what we’ve had was nothing like what hit Beaumont, Galveston, Sour Lake, Crystal Beach, and the like. (On the Crystal Beach front, Ron took a look at some pictures and confirmed that his mom’s beach house is totally gone — hard to tell if even the foundation is still there!)

What we got was almost no rain but high winds for several hours on Sunday afternoon. The winds brought down a tree in our backyard as well as a slew of leaves and branches. When I took Molly for a walk on Monday morning, I counted five trees of notable size down in the neighborhood. We lost power on Sunday evening between 6:00 and 7:00 PM, but it came back at 2:30 AM on Monday morning. We lost power again on Monday at 12:30 PM, and it did not come back on until 11:15 that evening. I spent the afternoon at a Panera Bread getting work done, while the neighborhood kids (school was cancelled) spent the day playing in the cul de sac. Benton and a friend from down the street built a fairly impressive leaf/branch fort (which included hauling branches out of neighbors’ yards four and five houses away…into our driveway), which we’ll get pictures of up at some point.

A neighbor down the street grabbed pizza and lasagna for a cul de sac dinner, and we got the kids down to bed as it got dark. At that point, we built a fire in our driveway and sat around chatting with some neighbors until the power came back on. Since we all have electric water heaters and stoves, hot water was at a premium (most had been used up by bathing the kids), so we put a coffee pot on the fire and heated water for tea, which went well with the s’mores that Julie and the other wives sampled.

There is no school again today, but we have power (for now). Maybe this wacky week will settle back down by tomorrow! Oh. Wait. Tomorrow is an already-scheduled “late start” day for the kids’ school. Maybe Thursday, then?

Posted in Benton, Julie, Tim