Hurricane Ike Over At Last!

What a long 24 hours it has been. Last night just after posting that we were ok the power went out. It was about 9:30 in the evening and the heavy wind had not even started in this area yet. Fortunately we have a generator and I had prepared everything to hook it up to the house so that we could run the essentials in the home. Unfortunately my plan had been to wait until the storm passed to hook it up so I did not account for the wind and rain. After the power went out we sat there in darkness with flashlights and thought about how we could get our TV working so that we could watch what was happening with the storm. I decided to go ahead and hook up the generator over night, but you are not supposed to use them in the rain. So at 11:00pm I went out to the garage to build a shelter for the generator so that I could hook it up and give us power to the house for the night. It took about an hour and I am sure all of our neighbors hate us now, but I got it made and we had power again right about midnight. Whew!! It was nice to have enough power to run the refrigerator, freezer, fans, lights as needed, and the TV and all of the essentials. Unfortunately air conditioning is a nice thing, but not an essential. We went from 9:30 last night until about 30 minutes ago (7:30) without air conditioning. It was very hot and made life almost miserable. Especially when you are trying to clean up inside and outside after the storm.

At about 4:00 in the morning we lost our satellite feed to the house which was a problem, but I figured it would be back when the storm passed. When I went out to inspect the house in the morning I saw that the satellite dish had been blown off the house and was hanging from the cable. Now, you all know what a big BYU fan I am and that the main reason for getting the dish this year was to watch the games. Well, I had until 2:00 pm to get the satellite re-connected so that I could watch BYU vs UCLA. Well, long story short, it didn't happen, I climbed the ladder and re-attached the dish to the roof, but no luck. So I went up again to try to adjust it with a compass and all, but no luck. To make matters worse our internet was down so I had no way to find out what was happening in the game. Thank you Ben and Mike for providing me updates. The internet started working again during the 3rd quarter so I was able to at least listen to the last quarter and a half of the blow-out. Go BYU!! Kristi wanted me to make specific mention of the fact that I was frantically trying to get it all to work up on a 20 foot ladder with wind blowing at about 15-20 mph and rain coming down. But what she doesn't understand is that this is important.

Anyway, as far as the house, we came through the storm very well. There is very little damage on the house, just a few ridge vents on the roof. Our shed got blown apart but it is a rubbermaid shed and is meant to come apart in pieces. I have already re-assembled the shed. The power came back on this evening so we are basking in a rapidly cooling house. We never did lose water and our water heaters and stove are gas powered so we were able to do pretty much everything we needed. Our neighborhood faired well also. We walked around and there was very little damage to speak of at all. I think that down south of us it is a different story though. It is amazing the difference in a storm when there is flooding involved. I expect that in the next few weeks we will be sent down to help out in the hard hit areas.

But anyway, we appreciate all of the phone calls over the last few days and all of the prayers in our behalf. I think the Lord truly blessed all of us as the storm never did get as strong as they had predicted and hopefully the damage will not be as bad as what had been anticipated.

Well, we'll talk to all of you later. We love you.