Four Four Storm

I'm not sure what folks will be calling this storm, but it's what I am sort of calling it in my head. There's "Katrina" and now there's "Four Four". As in April 4th. Bah - what a mess. Our neighborhood was one of the ones that got a direct hit from something; they're not sure if it was a tornado or just straight line winds. They were forcasting winds to be between 60 and 100 mph, so either one could have done the damage.

Doesn't matter - the important news is that no one was hurt (praise God!) and that the house is fine! (praise God!) The kids and I were home when it came thru, and it was pretty frightening for me and Poodle. Tooter, little dude that he is, slept right through it. :-) This first shot is a view of as much of the backyard as I could get. Basically, Four Four took down most of the rest of the trees that Katrina left. Four trees were either brought down or had their tops blown off. Two more will have to be removed for safety's sake, I believe. One of the tree tops was blown two houses down. We have some roof damage and will have a lot of clean up. But we were so blessed. The trees fell down in the perfect position to do the least amount of damage! Our fence sustained damage, and some of our neighbors' fences sustained damage from our trees. And one of the kids' little plastic pools from Walmart is who knows where. I guess it blew to Timbuktu.



This is a shot from outside the back door looking into the backyard. The first tree you see laying on the ground came from the broken tree directly in the middle behind the sago palm. It landed exactly parallel to the deck, not even three inches from it. Extraordinary. Didn't even touch the deck. Now, the top of that tree took out the next door neighbor's fence. But it totally missed our deck. That little plastic playhouse you see sort of behind the tree didn't even move an inch. So weird!




Mean storm totalled the swing set too. You should have seen Tooter's face when he saw it. He looked at it, looked at us, looked back at the swing, looked back at us with this incredulous, confused expression. Poor guy.








But, hey - big downed trees in the yard can be fun for the dog!

All is good. Jesus was with us as we huddled in the hallway. He was with us as we got our power back only 7 or 8 hours later. He will be with us as we get things cleaned up.

We are blessed in this mess! :-)