April Showers from a power washer

Wednesday night I was at the office late getting ready for a client review meeting Thursday. Shanna had spent the day working out, cleaning house, shuttling kids - pretty much the normal stuff. She emailed me about 5:30 to see where I was and how I felt about staying in, i.e. skipping church.

She knew we shouldn't but I was not going to make it not matter what. I still had an hour or so to finish the report and then was off to OfficeMax to have it prepared for presentation. She was wiped out and the thought of getting four kids bathed and fed in an hour was just too daunting.

So we skipped.

I got to the house about 9 and happily ate the salad she had prepared for our dinner. We were in bed by 10:30 - a little early for us and an obvious sign of how tired we were.

Casey, our almost 14 year old foxhound, was up at 3:15am. This was a little early for her bathroom break. She has a built in alarm system to notify us of her need to go outside. No barking or whining is necessary. She simply gets up and starts cautiously walking around the den. A few seconds of her paws hitting the wood floors is all it takes to wake us. Imagine Lord of the Dance performed by smurfs with all the dancers performing to a different song and you have an idea of what the sound is like.

So I get up to let her out and as I enter the den from the bedroom a wind hits the house like I've never heard before. I'll admit, I panicked a little. It had to have been 60-70 mph (the weatherman later confirmed this).

Our office sits up on a hill and our computer guys constantly stresses how important it is to get our server shut down when a strong storm is approaching. I hear our computer speakers belching out static everytime the lighting strikes so I run over and shut down the computer.

Oops. How can I check the radar now? I just shut down out internet. I'm sure Dish Network is not working in this mess. So I head for the Blackberry (yes I can call it my Crackberry as I am addicted). I pull up the radar and there are so many colors over our county that it looks like a bad abstract painting.

Lighter. I need to find the lighter in case the power goes out for good. Hey, maybe we've got a flashlight that works - meaning the kids didn't leave it on after the last time they played with it.

In walks Dawson and Delanie - go get in bed with mom I calmly say. Delanie heads that way whimpering - she doesn't do well in the morning or when her sleep is interrupted. I think Dawson just headed back to bed. He tends to take these things in stride. Dillon never got out of bed although he admits the storm did wake him which is a true testimony to the strength of it. Dakota's always in our room by 2am anyway.

Lighter - check. Flashlight - check. Let's give the Dish a shot. Hey it works. The radar is on and the weatherman is giving a perfect explanation of all the splashes of red, yellow, green and purple on the screen. Storm's moving fast - very fast. Strong wind, multiple rotations along the front line of the storm. I sit in the chair and watch until everything blows over - about 4am.

Everything's back to normal - except Casey. She's got heart failure so anxious moments like this tend to get her worked up. Plus she's still got to go out but there's no way she's going out in this. Finally the urge overtakes her fears and she quickly heads into the backyard and right back in. Total time out had to be less than 8 seconds.

Finally get some sleep off and on starting about 4:30. On the couch with one hand on Casey on the floor next to me.

Luckily, we sustained no damage. Our fence on the northside had a couple of panels fall over but they've been falling over for at least a year. So far, I'm taking a hardline stance on this one. I bought all of the fence on both sides last time (Shanna says last two times - she may be right) and I'm not going to do it again. My dog's pushing 14. She doesn't venture very far and if she does it's not very fast. Our neighbors on that side are trying to sell the house. I don't know them as they haven't lived there very long. I do know I had to escort the North Richland Hills police into my backyard a few months ago to see if there were any drunk teenagers back there. According to the officer several climbed the fence, knocking it down again, as they fled the underage party next door. None present in our bushes.

So I'm assuming that either the owners, or the new buyers will want to strike a deal to get the fence replaced. We'll see. Until then I'll keep wrapping it up with bungee cords.

So like I said, we had no damage. Many neighbors were not so lucky. Two houses down had a huge tree fall hitting the house and damaging their truck. As I drove Dakota to school it was a pretty eerie site and I realized just how lucky we were.

Here's some pictures from Allan Stanglin's blog on April 10. They live about a mile from us. Their neighborhood, from a damage standpoint, looked pretty much like ours. If you want to see larger images use the link to his blog above.

Hopefully everyone made it through the night safely.