Despite not having to bear the brunt of it, we are glad the ice storm of 2009 is over. We are so thankful for Susie's apartment in Bloomington so we didn't have to endure a week without power. There are still people who probably won't have power for another couple weeks. Since we were up in Bloomington we don't have any pictures of the storm, but our neighbor said he took some and he'll send them to us. I'm interested to see them but glad we weren't here to experience them.
We were feeling rather cramped in the studio apartment, but we felt fortunate to have a place to stay that had power and heat. The power to our house was out for about a week, and as far as we can tell, there isn't any major damage. The pictures below show how many tree branches came down, but thankfully none of them damaged our house. I have a few small repairs to make to the gutters on the garage, part of a fence is damaged, and the branches crushed a couple of the path lights on our front sidewalk, but other than that we're sound. We had to throw out a lot of food, but our insurance is covering that. Thank God for the protection of our house. To see all the limbs down and know how many big trees we have around our house and know that we don't have to deal with broken windows or a damaged roof is great.
Big thanks to John Mark and Kaleb as well as Mark for helping clear a place for us to park our car and carry our stuff in when we got home Thursday night. And also big thanks to Mark for looking after our place while we were gone. It was a huge peace of mind knowing we didn't have to rush home because our house was in good hands. Susie and I could have come back and toughed it out, but there was no way we were bringing an infant back to a cold house. So thanks again for all the help!
Today I cleaned up all the large branches and put them out front. The sun was out which made the yard a little precarious. I was either walking on the remaining ice or sliding through mud from the melting water. The city will be sending around chipper trucks to clean up all the dead branches that I can drag out to the street. Even though I got all the large branches our yard is still covered with a layer of small sticks and twigs. I think it looks like the 2nd little pig's yard after the big bad wolf blew his house down.
Hey Mom and Dad, I finally got to put the "saw on a stick" (said with a country accent) to good use. I'd used the saw part, but not yet bolted it to the stick until today. It proved invaluable to reach some of the branches that were broken but hadn't yet fallen off.
Here are a couple pictures of the backyard before I started this morning. You can see a couple lines in the picture. One is our cable, but we still have service. Weird. The other is our land line, which is still out. (I know we're the only people on earth that still have a land line.)
And here are a few pictures of the pile of branches I made today.
And in Cade-related news (since this IS a Cade-themed blog), he's started making these smacking and clicking noises with his mouth. I got a video at dinner last night of him working on his dolphin a little, but again he was very distracted by the camera. He wanted to grab it and put it in his mouth. Also, here are a couple pictures to show how much he's grown. The first one was taken in July and the second was taken a couple weeks ago. What a difference six months makes!
