We found lots of tree fossils and this rock may have been in a dinosaurs stomach.  Cool stuff.

This is all that remains of our shade/destruction tree.

Something for our spare time…

and our other spare time…

This is where the tree was uprooted in the backyard.  Looks pretty good now.  We are hoping to plant a garden here next spring.  Lack of sunlight is no longer a legitimate excuse.

Must have found some of that spare time.

Isn’t everyone supposed to help?

This is where Cookie stayed for a few weeks.  It only lasted until she felt good enough to jump the gates, or plow them over.  Let’s just say it’s been fun. We have physical therapy stretches 2-3 times a day, and for the first two weeks she couldn’t do anything but go out to use the bathroom.  We are now able to do walks morning and night increasing by 5 minutes each week.  Every little bit helps.

This was right after the painter left.

Trying to find something fun to do before school starts again.

The boys are in the back.

Whee e!

Relax for a bit.

Yesterday, the new gutters were installed…

and the inside walls have been patched.

Today, some trees are coming down…

and working behind a shroud of secrecy SOMETHING NEFARIOUS is happening in our hallway…

or it’s getting repainted. One of the two.

So at this point, we are just waiting on gutters, drywall, and insulation and hopefully we can get things back to normal.

They are coming to do the drywall tomorrow. Gutters are hopefully soon. We don’t have a date yet for the insulation, but hopefully it’s soon cause it’s gonna be another hot and humid week this week.

Party time!

A NEW CAR!

So, we didn’t stray much from the formula. I’m sure nothing will ever happen to our new car if we keep it parked there… right?!?

…

we’re parking it in the garage

I drove the car down the driveway and parked it in the street with no problems… I think it’s a mistake to completely total this car when there’s so much life left in her!

Oh well. We did end up buying a new car last night and are going to pick it up this afternoon… we’ll leave the online unveiling until then. Bet you can’t guess what vehicle we got

Just a little water coming into the office. Fortunately the computer was doing a great job of trying to block the water from pouring straight onto the floor.

Another limb skewered our hallway a bit, so we climbed up into the attic to see if we could remove the limbs and start plugging the holes to keep the rain from coming in.

It was a bit worse than we thought, but as we started pushing limbs out of the way, the rain stopped. The whole storm lasted for maybe 15 or 20 minutes.

So, we went outside to check out the aftermath.

Yup, that’s our car…

The limb crushed our car and knocked down our power lines. That was fine because the storm knocked out power to most of the region out here, so we didn’t really need those power lines anyways. Apparently, about 400,000 homes were without power from this storm.

The insurance adjuster today said that our car was the worst hit that he’d seen, so that means we WIN!

Anyhow, we had some limbs fall in the back yard also. Cracked a few windows, ripped up the gutters, etc.

And a little tree fell over into our neighbor’s back yard.

We had a bunch of people from church show up and help us get things cleaned up from the roof. All in all we had 10 punctures in the roof.

With everyone’s help we got things off the roof and the car pretty quickly

So yeah, that was a crazy storm. We’ve already contacted our insurance company and they’ve been great so far getting the ball rolling on the repairs. We’ve had lots of people offer to help and we’re getting things back together again. The restoration work is already moving.

The insurance company sent out emergency roof patching to patch over the holes in our roof. They sent out Flood Control to assess the water damage and they have started work on drying us out.

We have people coming to repair the roof which should be done by Friday. The inside will take a bit longer. We should know what we’ll get from the damage to our car in another day or so.

Anyhow, the important thing is that everyone is safe, that we’re doing as well as can be expected considering the circumstances. Hopefully, things will be back to normal as quickly as possible.

We’ll post more pictures of the process as they happen!