Galveston Sea Wall

Quite windy, rain off and on, son, his wife and my grandson visiting, enjoying their company. via Twitter – 3:37pm

Stepping outside, enjoying the wind via Twitter – 4:32pm

Saying hello to ike wondering how far the trees can bend before they snap. . . via Twitter – 6:39pm

Crack, There went a tree across the street, missed the houses and cars thankfully #ike texarkana. via Twitter – 7:06pm

Getting dark outside quickly. via Twitter – 7:23pm

And then I lost my internet, silence for over 2 hours, apology to friends who were worried, hoping I’d only lost power. (Actually it was both our universal backup battery and router on the blink). Another crack and more broken trees.

Ike packed quite a punch, seemed to go on and on. Considering the size of the thing, I guess it would take a while to move on through the area. And I don’t doubt it strengthened heading on into Arkansas because the last little bit was a whammy. You’d think it’d be weakening on the tail end, but not so.

My son, his wife and their little boy were visiting, made a wise decision to to travel back to Dallas that evening. Ike took up the whole interstate between here and there.

Friday, Texarkana went crazy, Walmart parking lot looked like Christmas season. Everyone inside stocking up. Long lines at the gas station and prices had jumped. Some stations were empty. Soon they all were empty. One of my friends was stranded in Hope, Arkansas, she couldn’t get gas there either.

Now I love storms, just not the damage they cause. I love the way it feels when a storm comes in. You can smell the rain, the wind blowing in your face, everything feels so alive, the clouds, the lightshow in the sky. Don’t mind a few sprinkles. But times like this I’m very happy that I don’t live on the coast (although I wouldn’t mind it rest of the time.)

I called friends in close by, to check on how they were doing. Many were without power, but had their cell phones turned on or their old corded phones plugged in. Inside the kids played games while my grandson slept through the first half of Ike. But Ike went on and on, naps don’t last forever.

Envied Angela her blackberry she was twittering from, checking her home from her cell. Yes, if I’d have set up text messages and twitter on my phone, I could have continued to give updates even if my power and internet went down. Learned that if you checked #ike on twitter’s search engine, you’d get constant storm updates http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23ike

We made it through, so nice to see sunshine the next morning. Fences down all over the neighborhood. Chain saws cleaning up the felled trees and branches. We had a pickup load of downed branches from Gustav to which we added Ike’s. When it dries up we’ll take them all over to the recycling center to get chopped up into compost.

Thankful that things were not worse, and as much as I was tempted, I did not run around the block during the storm, dodging falling tree branches, but stayed close to the porch or safely inside.

Feel free to add your storm story to the comments or add the link to yours.

Hello Ike