Hurricane Ike Hits Ohio--Kinda

Hurricane Ike headed up the Midwest and met a cold front which resulted in extremely high winds in Ohio on Sunday. I mean scary-high winds. We only received a tiny bit of rain, but trees were creaking and cracking like gunshots for a couple of hours Sunday afternoon. We lost electrical power at 2:30PM Sunday and it didn't come back on until 5:10PM Tuesday. And it wasn't just the 800,000 households in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky that lost power--it was all the way up I-75 to Dayton, Ohio and even further. I hear that the storm turned eastward at Sidney, Ohio and my sister-in-law heard on the radio (her power was restored Sunday night) that one third of all the traffic lights in the state of Ohio were out. Pretty strong winds, huh? I can't imagine what the people of Galveston went through or why some of them didn't evacuate.

We're heading up to Kettering tomorrow to get a Rhino-liner sprayed on the bed of the truck and I'll bring my mother home with me if she doesn't have her electrical power back on by then since she can't be trusted not to eat bad food from her refrigerator. We haven't gotten much done inside the house since there wasn't any power to run tools and we've had a mess to clean up in the yard. The storm definitely set us back several days in our schedule for getting the house done and on the market. The powers that be say that power may not be restored to most of Cinci until the weekend. The only good thing about the whole situation is that the cold front brought in cooler temperatures so we weren't suffering from heat and humidity while the power was off.

And man, did I miss the Internet! Sigh.

The neighbor's tree fell into "our" driveway and was so big Denny had to use the truck to drag it out of the way.

Just some of the branches that were torn off. Most of the large tops of the trees that broke off were caught up in the trees lining the lawn.

It's difficult to see the large broken-off tree in the middle of this photo, but the top half of the tree landed ten feet from our trailer. Even though we are sitting only ten to fifteen feet from the edge of the woods, none of the fallen trees or big broken limbs fell on the trailer and none of the smaller limbs that did hit us tore the rubber roof of the trailer. I think Denny's dad was watching out for us.