Hurricane Gustav Update

As you can see we have power!!! Surprisingly we held power for about half of the storm. I was even able to cook lunch for us and run the dishwasher in the middle of a hurricane. CRAZY!! Then about 2:40 the power went out. The winds were CRAZY strong and very scary. At one point I looked out the door to the carport to see our basketball goal fall over. Luckily we had J's car under the carport, otherwise his car would have been damaged. Our fence blew over, and we had water blow in under the front door, but we have slate tile in the entryway, so we just mopped it with towels and moved on. We also had water come up through (what we think is) a crack in our foundation b/c water was seeping through the grout in one part of our den. But, we just sopped it up, put towels down and that was that. We'll worry about the crack later. Through the worst of the storm we heard two of our neighbor's trees snap in two. Luckily they both fell towards their fence and not towards their house. This couple is so incredibly nice, they are from Nicaragua and this is their first hurricane to go through. She was very shaken up.

Our cable went out about 2:00, so I haven't seen any pictures of the aftermath. It was hard to keep up with what was going on with just a radio. It seemed to be that we were located in just the right spot...far enough away from the eye that we didn't have the worst of the storm winds, and yet close enough to it to keep from being hammered by the squal lines as they whipped around.

Thank you so much for your prayers! Please keep praying for all those along the coast as well as those who will be affected as the storm moves on.

Here are a few pics from what went on in our world today...

Our fence blew over when Rita hit in 2005, and our backyard neighbor "fixed" it by piggy-backing new posts to the old posts putting the new ones in cement. J offered to help him pay for a new fence but he said he could handle it. Today the new posts snapped at the base just above the cement. Looks like we'll handle the new fence this time b/c clearly he had no idea what he was doing.

Here's our basketball goal where Jon normally parks his car.

This is our neighbor's back yard. It only shows one tree down, but the fence that has fallen to the side of their property was knocked down by the second tree.

I tried to take pictures of the wind blowing the rain sideways, but in the pictures it comes out looking like fog. So I took a video. This was obviously not taken during the worst of Gustav. I was too scared to go outside at the height of the storm. This was taken during one of the "respites" we had, and before our neighbor's trees were knocked down. Hope it works!! I sound really weird on the video for some reason. I don't normally talk that weird. I promise!! lol