Surviving Hurricane Ike

So, can I tell you how blessed we are? Hurricane Ike came through early Saturday morning, September 13th. We lost our power which means we also lost our water. But we had no downed trees, no damage to our home or vehicles, and we came out safe and sound. You will see in the pictures what it looked like in our yard and some of our neighbors. I've shown "After Ike" pictures then "After Clean-Up" pictures of our yard so you can see the difference. If I hadn't you probably wouldn't have been able to tell we had a hurricane come by. The neighbors are another story. In the one picture you'll see the neighbors had 2 trees fall on their house - one fell over at the roots, the other just broke in the middle. I think that was the most amazing thing to see, to me. There are a couple of pictures of trees just broken in the middle like they were no more than a match stick. The final pictures show how blessed we were - one of the very small pile of debris that was in our yard and the other a much larger pile in front of our neighbors.
It took 1 week to get water restored. When we first got it I was excited because I knew we needed power to run the water pump so I thought our power was about to be turned on. Come to find out a neighbor knew how the system worked so he took his tractor down to the water system and hooked it up to the pump and started pumping water to our homes. When the water company found out, they rented a generator and took over the duties. We finally had our power restored this past Saturday, September 27th (2 weeks). It's amazing what a thrill that was!! But we had so many people willing to help us out (let us shower at their homes, sleep at others, use generators, etc) that it was not the hardship it could have been.
Did I tell you how blessed we are?