Irene Was Here

Here are a few pictures of the damage Irene did while she was here. Our neighborhood fared about the best of any I've seen. We only have small trees and a lot of them fell over, but in the neighborhoods with big trees they fell on power lines and houses. We were blessed to have power and water the entire time too. Some in our ward are still waiting for electricity.

There was another house like this in our neighborhood that had all the wood and insulation ripped out too. It was strewn all over the yard. I didn't take a picture because the poor family was outside staring at it with open mouths.

Notice the left side of this tree lost all it's leaves. All the trees are half bare from the direction the wind was blowing. It looks pretty funny. With all the leaves on the ground Spencer said it looks like fall, except all the leaves are green.

Mailbox barely hanging on. We saw several posts with the mailbox nowhere to be found.

This is a tree down that we drove by not in our neighborhood. I tried snapping a picture from the window but it didn't turn out.

That was the tree as we drove past. It was a huge tree that stretched from the curb across the front of the house.

A tree down on the wires.

I took 6 pictures and each time the camera wouldn't focus. Cheap camera.

I was really hoping for good pictures. Nathan's family always sends awesome hurricane pictures when they're out playing in them, but I couldn't even get one decent one. Oh well. It wasn't for lack of trying.

Nathan blowing the church parking lot at the tri-ward clean up the building FHE night.

There is a great video on our local news website:www.witn.com I tried pasting the entire link here, but when I clicked on it, it didn't work. So go to the home page and search "Perdue" then scroll down to where it says PERDUE: 1100 homes lost in Hurricane Irene. Let me know if it works for you.

Mean Irene

Last Saturday we experienced our first hurricane. The kids were really excited. At first I was a little nervous because Nathan had to spend the night at the hospital Friday night and work all day Saturday until 10pm, wouldn't be around to protect us or help if the house blew away. But then I realized it was only a category 1 and we should be fine. We played in it some, watched out the window a lot, made cookies, and I scrapbooked the most I've ever done in one day.

Spencer pretending to be blown away.

We have great big ditches in front of our house and some on the side.

This part of our ditch has never filled with water before. The kids were really excited to watch them fill up and then touch the mailbox, only to recede quickly.

Dancing in the hurricane.

I took a great video of the kids running around and doing cartwheels and screaming, "Hurricane Irene!!" but they were in their swimsuits and it was kinda long, so I decided not to upload it. Instead here is another one I took.