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.

It flattened one of our duck houses. Shown here looking to the base of the downed tree, showing all three trunks of the tree with the middle one crushing the duck house.

Nearly every home in our area suffered some kind of damage. Our claims adjuster came by yesterday. He said that his company processed twenty total losses this week. I suspect the other companies had many more. Our power came back on Thursday. We were without power for 144 hours. Six nights. I'm beginning to restock the freezer, but right now after throwing out all that meat and frozen foods, I can't quite stomach buying very much. It doesn't seem very appetizing. I told Eric yesterday that we're becoming something like "normal people" eating out every day!

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.