Charley News - Pictures once we get power.

Well, for those that can't get through to us (our house phone works again), we are doing fine. We all made it through the hurricane and now have two more residents in the house...two 3 week old baby squirrels that were abandoned. Amy is nursing them back to health. It is Monday am, and I am at work where we have power, but no AC. We have no power at the house, and the good estimates have us getting power Tuesday and Wendesday, but there are also some saying it may be Saturday before we get power. Its amazing how much you rely on power...it sounds pretty obvious, but you know you get restless during a 2-hour outage....we are going on 55+ hours. We made it to an ice-drop last night and got some ice for our coolers which have the essentials. We grilled out and ate allot of the meats from the freezer, but we still lost quite a bit.

The storm itself was pretty crazy...105 mile per hour winds in out back yard. The first thing to go was our screen door, which bent the metal on the frame and flew accross the yard. We live on the backside of our community, which is lined with that nice new PVC white fencing. Chris and I went out to grab that and as we did, the fence began ripping apart. We came inside for a bit, but the fence sections began to hit the house. We spent the bulk of the storm outside (we had no big trees to worry about) running the fence pieces to the front and putting them under the jeep. We each ended up on our asses a few times, as the fences acted like sails. We tried to help our neigbors too, but a piece of fence ended up through their window. When it was over, there were trees down everywhere (one of my little ones uprooted, but its salvagable), shingles in the yard (from my neighbors), and PVC fences everywhere.

We got some unreal pictures in other areas....Everywhere you looked 50 ft+ tall trees were down..mostly uprooted as opposed to snapped. Many blocked roadways etc. We are still missing 1/4 of our traffic lights, gas is about a 2 hour wait, and McDonalds had 55 cars backed into the street. I want a Big-Mac...but not that badly! Anyhow..more later!