Straight Line Winds.... meet The Humpty Dumpty House

Wow what a 36 hours it has been! The Humpty Dumpty House narrowly escaped some major damage from the storm on Tuesday evening. The events kind of went as so:

Tuesday evening ~1/29/08

• 6:45 ish - Adam returns home from work after staying there to study for a test he has on Friday
• 7:00 ish - it starts to get a bit windy and I comment that I think we need to get the TV on b/c there is a chance of severe storms so I want to know what is going on. My dear husbands reminds me that I may, in fact, worry too much and that it is just some rain and wind. (mind you, the tornado sirens have now been going off for several minutes)
• 7:05 ish - Our lights go off, our entire house shakes and a very loud "not just a little bit of wind and rain" sound can be heard. I run towards the bathroom/hallway area and yell "This is not NORMAL and where are you!!" Adam had gone on a hunt for our flashlight, Lord only knew where it might have been. He was using the light from his cell phone to try and find it. After the 5 seconds of madness stopped we were now also looking for our poor little dog, Abbi. Adam eventually found her sitting back by the patio door, shaking in fear so bad he could hardly pick her up, poor little thing. At that point I had located our small radio, that I had luckly put batteries in, so I found some weather coverage to find out if we were in the clear. Adam called me to the back patio door where he found Abbi and said "you have to see this". Our large tree that is only about 20 feet from our backdoor was 2/3rds of the way gone and lying in our yard. I immediately said "Praise God!" because had the tree fallen towards our house it would have done some major damage.
• 7:10 ish - Adam took the flashlight and went outside to see what else might have fallen. We found out he had 3 large fur trees uprooted and laying against our house and roof over the garage area. Another portion of a tree had fallen in our drive way and hit the front of my car. In the back yard we knew about the one tree but another has almost down and was literlly laying a foot away from the corner of our house, but didn't hit it. One of the trees on the side where the garage is had fallen on the powerline that goes to our meter.
• 7:15ish - Firetrucks are going up and down our street and firemen are coming 2 by 2 to each house to make sure that everyone is ok and to tell us it might be some time before we have electricity, so with it being so cold, we need to make sure to stay warm.
• 7:30 ish - We start calling our parents to let them know what is going on, and I talk to my Dad since he is my insurance agent about what to do with my car and if there is any damage on the house.
• 8:00ish - We are talking to our friends Steve and Michelle and Michelle offers to let us (including Abbi) stay at her condo in Avon since we have no heat and it is supposed to get down to below zero, so I start trying to get stuff together for that. Our next door neighbor comes over and tells us he has a big fire started in his fireplace if we need to warm-up and also has a chainsaw and other stuff if we needed to borrow it. Adam did go ahead and borrow the chainsaw, the amazing thing was that our neighbors property had virtually no damage.

By around 10:00 we are heading over to Michelle's condo packed up with our toothbrushes and some pajamas. Abbi made the trip too since we didn't think leaving her in a house w/o heat with subzero weather would be very nice.

Wednesday ~ 1/30/08

After fueling up for what we knew would be a long day with some Cracker Barrell breaksfast, Adam and I headed back to the house a little tenative about what it might look like in daylight. We intially took a drive down our street and noticed that basically every house south of ours on the street had a tree down, but no ones house seemed to sustain major damage.

We spent most of yesterday with Adam using the chainsaw to cut up the trees and get any that were on the house off of it, while I was dragging stray limbs and such into piles. All while fending off all the tree removal companies and contractors that were a steady stream of visitors for a couple of hours in the afternoon. We will probably use one of the tree companies to actually get the stuff we can't use for firewood off of our property, but the actual cutting we could do ourselves without paying $$$$$$. We got quite a bit done and I even got my car over to Church Brothers for an estimate and I'm taking it in next Monday to get fixed.

We finally got power restored at 10:30 pm last night and in the meantime used our fireplace, for the first time since moving in, so that we could try to have some warmth and keep the pipes from freezing.

This of course has put a little delay in our renevation plans this week, but praise God we are all safe and it was just some trees that fell down with a little damage to our house and car.

I will try to post pictures tomorrow, I left the camera with Adam today incase he needed to take any pictures for insurance purposes.