More tales from the hurricane

So, as you may recall, the cats and I were ready to "hunker down" for the storm at home, while Mike, as a member of the ride-out team was ready to spend the night at MD Anderson. I came down with a terrible cold on the Wednesday prior to the storm, and after watching 3 episodes of Big Love (during which we had a couple of momentary power outages), I made a pot of coffee for the next morning and took a healthy dose of Nyquil and went to sleep. I woke up around 2 a.m. to the sound of the power going off (lots of beeps followed by silence from the A/C and ceiling fans). When I got up at about 6 a.m. it was still raining hard with a fair amount of wind. In retrospect, I am really disappointed that I slept through it. Looking at all the havoc it wreaked I wish I could have experienced this once in a lifetime occurrence. I discovered that in addition to having no power (I was really glad I had made that coffee the night before) our phone was out as well. After it stopped raining I took these pictures. This is another view of the 30+ foot tall maple tree that was on the house.

What was so impressive is that it was actually uprooted. You can see here how it disrupted the pavers in our patio.

And this is what the front yard looked like. The pole for the basketball hoop just snapped off at the base.

In talking with the neighbors later I learned that they had phone service, so when I was at work the following Monday, I got online and reported our problem. I received an email from AT&T saying that there was an outage in our area (duh!) and that it would be repaired by September 29. On the 24th I decided to check on status of the repair and learned that my "trouble report had been closed." Needless, to say, I was a little upset! It was bad enough that I had been without electricity for 11 days at that point, but for AT&T to close my trouble report without even attempting to fix the problem almost put me over the edge. I immediately filed another report, and someone was out to fix the problem (a tree limb on the line, among other things) on Saturday morning. I was relieved that when the electricity came back on, my DSL would be working too. Almost 16 days without electricity is not something I would wish on anyone, but fortunately the weather wasn't too hot. I'd like to say I got a lot of stitching done, but the light wasn't the best, and it was too warm to knit. I'm just happy that I only had to make one trip to the laundromat!