Blackout 2008

Alright, I know this is late coming, but I've been in a non-blogging mood for quite a while now...(sorry mom). We did survive the hurricane, but it was not without a few hardships. We decided to stay here and ride it out, since all of our ward members and neighbors seemed to think it wasn't that big of a deal. I figured, "Hey, they've lived here a lot longer than me, so they must no better."

Well, that was a good idea and bad one at the same time. We made it through the night, but it was impossible for us to sleep, especially when Isabelle was in our bed so we put her back in her own bed and she slept through the rest of the storm. Jer and I had a harder time sleeping, but still we tried. Our power went out at about 12:00 in the morning and it immediately started to get hot. It sounded like someone had a power washer on our windows and every now and then we could hear branches and things hitting our house. The next morning, we did a quick check on our home and yard. We were very grateful that there was no damage to our house and our yard only had scattered branches and leaves, but nothing substantial. Most of this is due to the fact that our neighborhood is pretty new and we don't have a ton of large trees surrounding us. After the initial assessment and a little clean up of the yard, we decided that we better start eating as much as possible or our fridge was going to go south fast. We ate what we could, but I had just gone to the grocery store a few days earlier and we had things that we just couldn't get rid of in one day. Needless to say, we lost a ton of food and it stunk really bad.

We decided to check out the neighborhood and the surrounding area and then get out of town if our power wasn't back on by Sunday. We started by walking over to the lake that is across the street from our house. It was crazy, there is a sidewalk that circles the lake and it was completely gone. There were huge trees floating in the lake and on the opposite side of it, the water was at the level of some of the driveways. All of our neighborhood was out watching it rise, hoping that it wouldn't flood. Luckily, it was about 15 feet away from our houses when the water stopped. All in all, our neighborhood came out quite well, I can only think of one house that had a tree fall into the garage, so we were all pretty lucky. The neighborhoods surrounding ours were not so lucky. There are a lot of trees in this area and if any of you have ever been to the woodlands or the Houston temple, you'll know what I'm talking about. Most of these homes had trees falling somewhere on their property. We saw a ton of houses with trees right on top of them. Some of the roads were flooding and they were telling people not to leave their homes, even though we did.

The next day, our power was still out and I was still hot!! Jer and I decided that it would be best for us to take off, since they didn't think our power would be on any time soon and his office was still closed. The only road that was open was I 45 north, so we headed up to Dallas to find refuge with Heidi and Nate. They were so nice to let us stay with them, even though I had just been there three weeks earlier. I'm sure they're sick of us by now, but I really do appreciate it. We stayed with them until Tuesday when Jer's office opened back up and when we got home on Tues night, our power was still off. It was really disappointing, but we kept on thinking that it was going to come back on at any time. Well, that was wishful thinking because it was out until the following Sat at 5pm. We had been without power for a full 7 days and let me just say that it was not cool at all. Candle light is not the way to go if you have a blackout, so next time we're going to invest in some sort of battery powered camping lights. I kept us busy by hanging out with friends who were having the same problems during the day, but it was hard to have lights out at 8pm. I think I threw away about 200$ of food, which was a waste and it was hard to see it all go into the garbage. I really hated to throw out things that were brand new, like large packages of Costco chicken. When the power finally came back on, Isabelle and I were jumping up and down and running through the house screaming. Izzy kept saying, "Our TVs working, our TVs working." Sad, but it was really exciting too!! Although it was hard and I'm so glad it's back on, I know people that were without electricity and in some cases water for close to two weeks, so really I'm not complaining that much. It was hard on everyone and it hit us much harder than anyone thought it would. We are very grateful that we and everyone we know are OK! Jer went down to Galveston last Sunday to help with the churches humanitarian aid and he said it was really amazing to see everything out there. The church had 1500 volunteers that day and most everyone was very happy when the Mormons showed up. Apparently the red cross and other Churches are referring people to the Mormons because they are so organized. Galveston if pretty much decimated and most of the homes Jer was helping out with will need to be completely redone. One interesting note is that the church building down there was totally fine.

So, that's our crisis. If anyone would like to donate to the save the Harrison's fund, we are now accepting cash only donations. Just kidding, we'll take all major credit cards and checks as well. Here is a video of our lake, I can't put up the other pics because they are in a word doc, but I'm sure you've seen a lot of it on TV.