Pardon Our Mess...

Monday night is when we take the kids to my mom and dad's and then we go out for grocery shopping/date time.  Monday night we went to a little local burger joint on the river.  We sat outside, had our meal and a beer, then went on our way.  It seemed so peaceful.  We then went to Target.  We had heard during the drive there about some rain coming.  No biggie it seemed.  When we were in Target we could hear the thunder and the rain and it did seem to be raining pretty hard but by the time we got out (I got some killer clearance curtains by the way!) it was barely drizzling.  We went to get the kiddos at my parents house.  As it turned out my parents had had a power surge and the fire department was checking it out as a precaution.  

If only that had been the only excitement that night...

A couple blocks from our house I noticed it seemed awfully dark.  Then we came to an intersection where the light wasn't working so we knew there was no power.  When we came to turn on our street police tape stopped us.  

Uh-oh.  

It was terrifying knowing something had gone on but it was so dark we couldn't see what it was.  All we could really do was pray.   In the morning this is what we saw.  You'll forgive me if some of these pictures are hard to make out...

Here's a tree lying over our street.  Squashed two cars.  Our neighbors house is on the right hand side of the picture.  The tree was 4 feet from his windows.  

 There's a squashed Mercedes in there somewhere...

 Here's my 6 foot 4 inch husband next to the root system of the upheaved tree.  He's not yelling by the way :)

 This branch is lying on our roof which you can partially see in the right corner.  The power lines look all helter skelter because the branch basically scooped them up in two different places and twisted them all around.

Here's our tree in the back of the house snapped in half.  Yikes.  

 We don't know the progression but we think our tree snapped this electric pole in half.  When our tree came down it grabbed up everyone's wires and then ripped everyone's meter boxes off of their houses.  Just lovely.

We live in a Nationally Registered Historic district which means everything is really old and really close together.  Our block is a triangle block where all of our backyards touch.  To have these huge trees come down and have no one hurt is just amazing to me.  God's hand was definitely on our house.  Nick was just shaking his head saying the tree behind our house defied gravity and defied physics by not falling into our house.  But that's how God rolls.

All of this happened Monday and it is now Sunday.  We were without power until Thursday when it came back on (thank the Lord!).  We still have some huge chunks of wood to get rid of but other than that we are business as usual here.

Now I just have piles of laundry to catch up on.  I'll take that any day though :)

Hope you all survived the storms safely!  God is good, all of the time!