Hurricane Ike

I never thought living in Columbus, OH that we would need to be concerned with hurricanes. But on Sunday, the remains of Hurricane Ike blew through Columbus with incredibly high winds. We were under a high wind advisory, which really meant nothing to most of us except probably no golf or sailing! As the kids napped Sunday afternoon and I was working on stuff around the house, the noise of the wind in the trees just got louder and louder. Wyatt woke up from his nap when the power went out around 3:30pm as his fan shut off (the kids both sleep with fans on in their rooms for 'white noise'). I thought it wouldn't be a big deal and the power would quickly return, so we went outside to watch the windstorm. Matt came home about 15 minutes later from doing some work and said the coffee shop he was at also lost power. We heard later in the evening that over half of Columbus was without power.


My biggest concern at this point was the food in my refridgerator and freezer. I had just gone shopping on Saturday with our entire food budget until Matt was to get paid next---last time I ever do that! My neighbor informed me that the food should be okay as long as we don't open the doors for up to 24 hours....surely we would have our power back on by then. We went and got some food for dinner on sunday night at a fast food restaurant (all the groceries stores near us were also without power) and spent the evening sitting by candlelight.


We woke up Monday morning still without power......to make a long story short, we were without power until Tuesday evening. And we are thankful because there are people in Columbus who are still without power. Schools have been closed all week and many businesses are still closed. We went to Panera monday morning to get some bagels and also to plug in our cell phones and charge them--and it seems everyone else in the city had the same idea! It was packed.


By Monday afternoon it was appearing that we wouldn't have power anytime soon, so I began to try and salvage our food. But every place in the city had signs up that said, "NO ICE--SOLD OUT". Thankfully we had a few friends with power so they took some of our food to their freezers and refrigerators.


It's amazing how much we rely on electricity--no microwaves, no TVs, no hair dryer, no oven or stove, nothing cold or hot--everything is room temp, no air conditioning, etc.


When the kids and I went to the park on Monday morning, it was just crazy to see the destruction. This is just a glimpse of what we saw.......

it's hard to tell in this pic, but this tree snapped halfway up and the top portion was just hanging there this tree also took down the fence behind it and collapsed in the parking lot...you might have to click on it to see it up close

trees like this were everywhere around the city...just snapped off right in the middle

if you look closely, you can see how this tree even pulled up the curb with it and the concrete cracked all around the roots
We are thankful to be with electricity now....especially since many people are still without. I have much to catch up on but thought I should post this first to give you an idea of why I have been MIA!