On the other side

We are on the other side of the storm and we are in good shape. It was pretty scary Friday night/Saturday morning and I didn't get much sleep. I don't know how much rain we got but the wind is what made the biggest impression on me. It was pretty intense. I laid awake just waiting to hear glass breaking. Thankfully, I never heard any, although I heard a lot of other things that were pretty unsettling. We lost power about 1:15 AM on Saturday and from that point until I got out of bed around 8, I probably only got about four hours of sleep.

It didn't stop raining here until about 4 or 5 PM. The winds didn't stop until later but by the afternoon they had died down considerably. Around noon, Evan and I went out to walk our street and survey the damage. We were pretty surprised by what we saw. Because of how our house and fence are arranged, you actually cannot see our front yard or neighbors' yards from our front door. All we can see is our "back" yard and it didn't look too bad.  There were a few medium sized branches and tons of little branches and leaves in the yard. The only other damage was that a section of our back fence (about 10 ft. long) had fallen down. When we stepped into our front yard, the first thing we saw was the uprooted tree in our neighbors' front yard. Then two houses down, we saw that the brick wall (originally about 8 feet tall) in-front of their house had been knocked down by the wind. We made it to the end of the street before turning back because the rain had picked up again.

We headed out again around 4:30 and walked down to the front of the neighborhood. You can see all the pictures that I took here. Other than our tours of the neighborhood, we passed the time by playing chess, cards, and hanging out talking with neighbors. We started getting ready to go to sleep around 9:30. Just as Evan was headed to the garage to get more gas for the generator the power came back on. I don't think I have ever been so happy to have the power restored. We could have handled it if we would have had to go longer without power but I think I was so excited because I had started to accept the fact that it could be a week or more with out power and it was just so unexpected.

I didn't sleep much better last night because of the thunderstorm that rolled through early this morning. We got about five inches of rain in about a three hour period. Evan said he woke up in the middle of it and thought he was having a flashback of the previous night. I couldn't sleep because I was worried about water coming into our house since the ground was so saturated from the earlier storm. Thankfully, that wasn't a problem.

While things are progressing, the area as a whole is far from being back to "normal." I don't really know how to describe it but it is just chaotic in many places. I have not felt that it is chaotic in the sense that things are unsafe, but chaotic in the sense that people are getting restless and impatient. I told my brother today, who is still in San Antonio, that if I were him, I wouldn't come back until I had to.

Overall, we are very thankful, and consider ourselves blessed. Thank you for your prayers. Please continue to pray for the entire area and especially for those in leadership positions as they face many difficult decisions in the upcoming days and weeks. I think the thing we all need the most is patience.