Ike strikes

Hurricane Ike barreled into our small town early this afternoon, after causing major havoc along the Texas Gulf coast and the Houston area last night and early this morning. Thankfully, damage was much less severe than had been feared. We are roughly 200 miles from Galveston, far enough inland that we hardly ever get much of any impact from Gulf storms. This time, though, forecasters had predicted winds of 75 to 90 mph, although it didn't appear to me that we had anything close to that. But there were lots of downed trees (a few of which stuck homes), and widespread power outages throughout East Texas. Our house was spared anything serious; a tree across the street fell over but missed us completely, and we only lost power momentarily during the storm. The only casualty was our back yard gazebo and birdbath which blew over.

After it became clear a short time ago that the worst was over, I drove around a bit to asses the damage in our neighborhood. Here are some photos:



I can't say I was overly concerned at any time during the storm, as we have a special resource to depend upon in an emergency. As you probably know, animals have a sixth sense for predicting natural dangers, and since we have three cats, we are fortunate to be protected by the F.E.W.S., or Feline Early Warning System:



Since we never spotted more than one cat taking refuge at any given time, we felt reassured that things were not going to be so bad.