Scenes from Irene

There are a lot of people up and down the Eastern sea board will are still without power, who have feet of water in their house, and whose property has been destroyed. I am extremely grateful that our Irene experience was far less extreme.

We began to get tornado warnings last night around 10 pm. Because our area doesn't have tornado sirens, neither Ry or I got much sleep last night. We spent some time in our basement with the boys around 11:30 pm and then we all slept on the first level. Ry stayed up most of the night monitoring the radio, since we lost power sometime before midnight.

When the boys got up around 7, we got up and surveyed the damage. We lost some pretty big branches. The most devastating loss of course, was part of our beautiful stockade fence. Still, I have to count ourselves pretty lucky. 

We decided to start eating the perishable food from the fridge, since the estimate from the power company about when we would get power back was 12 hours to a week. We tried to be careful about how often we opened the refrigerator door. Because Gummy Bear tends to be a stand-in-front-of-the-open-refrigerator-door-and-survey-the-offerings kind of kid, he came up with this helpful "reminder".

He seriously told me to write his name on the tape and draw a big X on it.

We have a gas stove (HURRAH!), so Ry boiled some water and made us some french-press coffee. It was wake-you-from-the-dead strong, but ooooh so good after the night we had.

I cooked up a bunch of our eggs, and Ry cooked our bacon. Mmmm. Bacon.

We kind of spent a quiet day loading the stuff we wanted to salvage from the fridge into coolers and hung out with the kiddos. When our power finally came back on 17 hours after we left it, I tossed all the food that didn't make it and thoroughly cleaned my freezer and fridge. It looks new!

So, anyway, I guess the deal is that Irene treated us pretty well. The road below is about 6 blocks from our house. It was taken at dusk with a cell phone, so sorry for the quality. Still, it's an excellent reminder that things could have been much, much worse.