Hurricane hit us!

We never thought Hurricane Ike would affect us in southern Ohio, but it did. Yesterday around 2 p.m. our power went out. Shortly after strong winds came. We thought it was going to rip the roof off. Luckily it didn't, but it did rip one of our trees right out of the ground! The neighbor across the street from us had their entire chimney ripped off their house! And another neighbor had a huge tree crash down onto their driveway...thank goodness it didn't fall the opposite direction or it would have crashed through their house. Almost every house in our large neighborhood had damage- siding ripped off, mostly, and trees down. I saw a house with a huge wooden swingset that was tipped over and demolished. I'd never seen (firsthand) anything like it. They later said that we got winds of more than 80 mph. We of course were not prepared. We had two flashlights, one of which had hardly any juice left. We had 3 candles but couldn't find matches (finally I located a small box in the basement). Our portable dvd player only had 30 minutes of juice, so the girls watched a WonderPets dvd for a few minutes. I kept them in the basement with me for a couple of hours. The girls didn't mind, they played with some of the old toys I had packed away down there.

For dinner, we had Chinese food. Our friends own the local Chinese restaurant. They didn't have any power (lights) but they cook with gas, so they were cooking in the dark. Steve picked up some white rice, general tso chicken, noodles and an eggroll, so we ate well last night. Since our bathroom was pitch black last night the girls skipped their bath. The hurricane turned the weather cool, so we opened up the windows to get some air. Luckily Sophie and Kylie slept all night.

I woke up this morning at 8 a.m. and still no power. Rumor has it that Duke Energy sent all their workers to Texas to work on Ike, and it would be 2-4 days here without power! Almost all of Cincinnati has no power, over 500,000 without power. My mom (Nai Nai) lives in northern Indiana and she has power so I drove the girls there. Steve had to stay home because he has a ton of new claims coming in from this incident. It's almost 3 p.m. and he said there is still no power and the land phones aren't working at all. I'm glad we're here. We were planning on coming to Nai Nai's this weekend so now we're here early. I plan on leaving Wednesday morning to go back home.

The funny thing is that our fridge and freezer are practically bare. I was planning on going to the grocery store yesterday but then the hurricane hit. At least I don't have to worry about a lot of food spoiling, just some milk, ice cream and some frozen chicken.

I took many photos of the damage, I'll post them later.

One thing this hurricane made me realize is that we need more supplies in case of emergencies. More batteries, another flashlight or two, a lantern, a small radio, etc. I plan on going to the store soon to buy some of this.