Can we please not repeat last week?

In one week our house has survived a pig roast for 50+ people, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake, and Hurricane Irene. It's been a rough week and thankfully we pulled through just fine.


The hubs and did everything we could do to prepare for the oncoming storm, short of boarding up the house and buying a generator, on Friday night. He climbed the roof and broke out the 20ft ladder to cut down as many tree limbs near our house as he could. We were both terrified that the dead tree right behind our house would come crashing down. So scared in fact that we bunkered down in our living room on Saturday night for a restless night of sleep. We stayed up until 1am just listening to the wind howling outside and hoping that a tree didn't come down on our house. I was worried about our cars too, but in the grand scheme of things I would have gladly taken a destroyed car over a destroyed house.


We tried to be jovial and joke that we had enough booze and water stashed in our house to survive a few days without power, but really we were both on edge. A large tree limb came crashing down at 11:30pm Saturday night and in my paranoid state I threw on my rain boots and slicker to go outside and dragged the limb to the back of the yard. I was certain the wind would pick up the limb and throw it through either our patio door or bay window. If I would have had some rope or a fisherman's hook I would have been a great character on a horror movie set.

My brother was supposed to come over and ride out the storm with us, but unfortunately the high winds came sooner than expected and it wasn't a good idea for him to drive over in 50+ mile hour wind gusts. That was just another thing I worried about, my poor brother stranded all alone during a hurricane.

Thankfully, we're all okay. We were even in the very small minority of people who didn't lose power on Saturday. Sunday afternoon we took a walk through the neighborhood to get the dogs out of the house and see the extent of the damage. I couldn't bear to take pictures because how do you stop and take a picture of your neighbor's house with a tree on top of it? I couldn't do it. One of the great things that attracted the hubs and I to our neighborhood was all the trees. However, this week it looks like a pack of monsters ran through the neighborhood and ripped down every tree and tree limb they could get their hands on.



Jewels needs a vacation because she didn't sleep a wink over the weekend. She was really on edge and had so much to do with all the growling every time our house was pelted with another acorn or tree limb. Both dogs had to be coaxed out of the house anytime we made them go to the bathroom during the storm. We tried to pick times when the rain was less of a monsoon, but it rained for almost 24 straight hours!

I hope you and yours made it through the storm. Irene caused a lot of damage, especially in the Northeast, and people died during the storm. Of course that made me want to cuss out the idiots shown on the weather channel even more.