Sun is shining, skies are blue, we are blessed!
This tree, our big old Catalpa tree you may remember from this post, was our big concern in our hurricane preparations. I took this photo on thursday evening right before the tree service we called arrived to trim some of the limbs and lighten the weight of the bigger ones.
This tree sits southeast of our house and could easily have sent a big limb through our roof or the roof of either of the rental houses next to us.
As you can see we got a little drastic about it to be safe, taking out anything that was split or questionable.
This is how it looks this morning. If you look close at the fronts of both of the rental houses, you can see branches piled up in front of them and they were strewn all about our lawn and the road too. Had we not lightened the weight of those big limbs we would surely have a different story to tell today!
The front of my studio faces north so we boarded those big windows up to protect them from flying debris in all the noreast winds .
Right before we boarded the windows I took a shot of the hibiscus that were just starting to bloom fully since I planted them about a month ago. I figured they would be destroyed when the wind shifted to the west as this is the west side of the building. They fared better than I expected, they are a little broken, flowers gone of course but I think they will make it.
The west side of the building. The east side which i don't have a shot of, lost a bunch of shingles off the roof, Still, all things considered, we did great!
The red tipped photinias on the East side of the building got uprooted and we hope to stake them up and hopefully they will live. You can see a few broken shingles here and there.
The rain ( we got over a foot) flooded the ditchbanks and streets and you can see the tideline as to how far the water came up on the property. Fortunately we are on fairly high ground here so we didn't flood.
We had rain and wind for about 30 hours and so glad we didn't get it any worse than we did. We lost power for about 5 hours. My hope is that everyone who was in Irene's path recovers quickly with little damages and loss.
We have heard that the beach is closed but may reopen in time for the holiday weekend and that the first assessment is the relentless pounding actually may have added sand to the beach instead of taking it away.
Prayers were definitely heard around here!
Thank you to everyone who sent them!
