The Blustery Night

Thursday morning
Scene:  3:00 am, our house.  I am sleeping peacefully.
Erin;  Mom!
Me:  Going into her room "What's up Erin?"
Erin;  "I'm Scared.  What's that noise?"
Me:  Realizing it's windy for the first time "It's wind.  Wow, it's really windy out there huh!"  In fact, it sounds REALLY windy out there.  Crazy.  I would be scared too if I were 5.  So I ask if she wants to come into our bedroom and sleep on the floor.  She agrees and I make her a bed on the floor, but never really get back to sleep.  I think "Oh, our little Christmas tree is out on our porch, I should see if it tipped over."  So I get out of bed and open the front door.  And yes, there is our little decorative 3 foot Christmas tree tipped over, with ornaments rolling all over the porch and lawn.  I pick it up, drag it inside and go back out for the ornaments.  And...they're gone.  No ornaments.  They have flown hither and yon, far beyond my reach.  Plus, it's freezing outside, so I think, "I'll just get them in the morning."  Back to bed.  Still can't sleep.  The front door starts making a noise like a horn blowing every time a big gust comes.  Not conducive to falling asleep.  4:00 am.  Cameron gets out of bed because he can't sleep either.  That wind is LOUD!  What is it, a tornado?  He checks on the house.  I am still trying to fall asleep.  5:00 am.  Just barely, barely went to sleep and Cameron wakes me up. 
Cameron:  "Babe, babe, get out of bed, I need your help!"  Said very hurriedly and sort of panicked.  (Accompanied by shaking me awake).  Then he leaves.  So I get up and start walking around the house trying to find him.  I see a flashlight waving at me from out of our living room window.  Oh No!  Not outside!  It is cold out there.  Well, I am a good wife.  So I get my shoes on, grab a sweater and put my coat on over it.  and outside I go.  I found him in the backyard trying to secure our awning that used to be hung up over our living room window but has broken off and is banging and flying violently in the wind.  The poles that had it  anchored to the house were flapping in the wind and we thought they were going to go crashing through the window.  I reach up and grab the flapping awning and hold it close to the house while we figure out how to secure it.  It took all my strength and Cameron's too, just to keep it there, the wind was blowing so hard.  We don't have rope, (of course, right?)  So I think and say, I have some twine, would that work?  So I leave Cameron, run inside and find Liam at the back door a little scared because we aren't in the house.  It's okay I say, we're just outside fixing something.  Just sit on the couch.  I get the twine.  Outside again and holding down the awning while Cameron secures it.  The wind has been blowing so much, the string that was on the awning in the first place is tangled in sticks and knotted up.  We try and get the knots out, but realize we can't feel our fingers anymore.  We need scissors.  Back inside again and there's Liam and Erin both at the door a little scared.  The wind is loud, the power is flickering.  So I grab a flashlight, put them on the couch, reassure, reassure, cover them up with a blanket and back outside with the scissors.  As I walk out, the power goes out and stays out.  We cut the rope instead and Cameron gets it tied down.

 Awning

  Back inside and run warm water over our cold fingers.  Truly, I have never been that cold before ever.  Back outside to the garage to get our oil lamps.  I find them and back inside to light them.  I can't get my fingers to work.  Cameron can't either.  We have to wait.  Here comes Owen.  Truly?  It's not even 6:30 yet.  (Yes, it took us that long to tie the awning down.  That wind packs a punch.  It lifted me off the ground a couple of times while I was holding the sail, uh, I mean awning.  We light the lamps and are just getting a little warmed up when we look outside and our shed is lifting up off the ground.  Really?  Okay, back outside, this time with gloves and a hat.  The shed is truly flying up into the air and Cameron and I are grabbing onto it, trying to ground it.  We get the doors put back on (kind of) and are standing inside thinking about how we're going to anchor this down.  Again with the twine.  Sure wish we had some rope.  But, you do what you can right?  Cameron runs to the house and leaves me to hold down the fort...literally.  I am leaning with all my might against the doors to the shed and holding it down and it's still not enough.  The wind is kicking me all over the place.  So I fortify and just push with everything I have.  At least the doors are still up.  Cameron comes back with the twine and a crowbar.  He pounds the crowbar into the ground in front of the shed and we start to tie the doors down and attach them to the crowbar in the ground.  Luckily, we had cleared out our garden area and had a ton of flagstone laying in a pile right there.  We got some of that and put it on the frame of the shed to hold it down.  We had everything all tied down and were looking at it to make sure it would hold when a big gust of wind came and broke the twine.  Down went the doors and up went the shed.  Back to square one.  We did the same thing again, but with plastic over the doors so the sharp edges wouldn't fray the twine.  It was so cold.  my mouth was numb and I couldn't form words because my mouth wouldn't work the way I wanted it to.  I had to speak very slowly and enunciate every word so Cameron could understand.  We kept looking at our one tree that was whipping and bending in the wind, hoping it wouldn't fall on us when we were right there by the shed.  We got the shed secured and back inside.  Reagan was up by this time, so we all stayed in the living room trying to keep warm.  I looked out the window and SNAP, the twine for the awning broke.  Back outside.  We decide we need rope and Cameron decides to  go to his parents to see if they have any.  We don't have a phone that's working.  Power's out and no cell.  So we secure it as best we can and Cameron goes off in search of rope.  I start feeding the kids cold cereal.  Cameron is back.  I put Erin in charge of Reagan and we are back outside, roping down the awning.  As we are finishing, Cameron's parents come to see if they can help.  They brought some bungee cords.  As we are talking to them, the shed falls apart AGAIN.  WHATEVER!!!  So we rig up a system with the bungee cords and tie the shed down. 

Here's our bungee cord system.  All the stuff on the right and left is either debris from the storm or cinder blocks we pulled out of our garden.

This is after the wind died down.  This is what it did to our doors.  All misshapen and bent out of place.

This is showing how windy it is.  It pulled the shed off the foundation.

The sides and the back of the shed buckled out with the wind.

 We went back inside, fairly secure all things would stay strong.  We had said a couple of family prayers by this time, and I thought Heavenly Father knew I would shrivel up and freeze like a Popsicle if I had to go back out soon.  So we watched out the window at the destruction going on around us. Our trees were blowing so hard.  We have a big, thick Sycamore in front of our kitchen window and the trunk was just swaying back and forth.  Really scary.  As we were looking out the window, one of the branches of our tree broke off.  

Here's where it broke off.

Here's the branch.

 It was quite an awesome sight.  Cameron and I both got worried a tree would come through our roof, so we took the kids downstairs and started playing games.  We got done securing things outside at about 11:30 and the wind lasted until the afternoon.  Our house got pretty cold, because we had no heat, so all of us were in coats and hats.  We told the kids it was like camping.  After the wind died mostly, we decided to drive around and see how others were fairing.

We noticed some siding had come off our house.

We had leaves and sticks outside our door.  When we picked up, the city said to put your debris curbside and they would pick it up.  We had about 6 wheelbarrows full of sticks and 10 big garbage bags full of sticks and debris.  Plus the big branch.  Crazy.

This was in my in-law's neighborhood, across the street from my good friend.  This was only one of many, many pine trees that were down.

This was an electric pole that had snapped off and was blowing around in the wind.

This is another big pine that was down in our old neighborhood. 

Our heat and power stayed off until about 12:00 am.  We were lucky and got our gas fireplace started.  It couldn't blow, because that part used electricity, but we camped out in the living room and it stayed nice.  Cameron's parents came that night to get warm and visit.  We made the kids' beds in the living room and they slept there and Cameron and I slept in our room under six quilts.  We learned our area of the state got the worst of the storm, with wind gusts up to 103 miles per hour.  Hurricane force.  The average gust was about 75 miles per hour.  We were very blessed though.  Not much damage and we got our power back the next day.  Some in our ward didn't get power until Sunday.  There was supposed to be another wind storm on Sunday night, so church was cancelled and the wards went around cleaning up the debris from the previous storm so it wouldn't become a danger in the next storm.  Cameron and Liam went and helped out.  We battened down our hatches again, and waited for the wind that never came.  Cameron said "You know, I think we had so many people praying for safety, it turned back the storm."  I agree.  I have never seen that much wind before.  It was really scary, but I am glad we were so very blessed.