On May 8th, we had what some people are calling an inland hurricane. It brought a large tree down in our yard that landed on our deck, near enough to hitting the house that it pushed the sliding glass door in the dining room open. The tree had 3 huge trunks and all three came down in one instant into our back yard.
After this experience, a lot of our neighbors and friends are getting generators. We won't be getting one. We've decided that the best preparedness is having lots of fresh water in storage which we had for this power outage. We also already have a camping stove which we put to use. The other thing that we should get is a kerosene heater. The weather after the storm was gorgeous, but if it had been chilly for those 6 days we could have been miserable.