After the Storm

Last night as I was outside grilling our dinner, a storm started brewing. I snagged my meat off the grill just as the rain began. Normally, we love to watch storms from the comfort of my back porch, but this one was a doosey! Everything, on my porch was starting to blow away from the incredable winds. Because we are right next door to our new home that is being built, I watched helplessly as construction debris started to fly. I came inside to discover water streaming down the INSIDE of my big picture window as the rain and now hail was hitting it horizontally. I decided I had better shut down the computer, and missed watching the worst of the storm. I heard some terrible crashes, though.

When, the storm finally passed over, I stepped out to the view you see above. This lovely rainbow presided over my damaged barn and the toppled port-a-potty that USED to sit to the right of the barn. The kids' Step Two slide had been blown about 200 feet and had come apart, we lost a few limbs, and we had oodles of construction trash out our dumpster everywhere. The wind had amazingly picked up large sheets 4' X 8' sheets of plywood and tossed them way across our property. One piece was even ripped in two. One of our overhead power lines is not quite connected properly and is hanging down lower than it should. WE were lucky. My in-laws who live next door, lost most of the limbs out of two very large trees. It almost looks as if there was some type of wind shear that came through. The corn in the field across the road is literally flattened.

Our new home faired pretty well, although it did get pretty wet. There doesn't appear to be any structural damage, but a lot of rain blew in under the eaves so there was standing water on every floor. Our basment is equipped with sump pits to deal with ground water, but no pumps yet. So, after the rain settled into the ground our basement began to fill up. It was only a couple of inches, but our brand new furnace that was just delivered that day, was sitting in it. Barry put it up on some wood blocks and ran out to by a pump. He was gone nearly two hours.

Meanwhile, we lost power just as the sun was setting and the light was fading. We ate dinner, that fortunately was done just in time, by the light of one candle and then the kids and I trekked out to the barn to find our oil lamp. Then the two older girls went on a candle hunt in our basement and returned with my stash of scented jar candles. Our home was bathed in a soft warm glow of candlelight!

When the storm hit, Barry and the girls had run to town to rent a movie. They were really disappointed that movie night had to be cancelled due to our lack of power, so I promised them a game. We put a grumpy Abigail to bed and set the oil lamp on a low table and played dominoes until late in the evening. I think the kids consider our power outage a fun adventure.