Irene

So yesterday, we had the pleasure of meeting Hurricane Irene. We've been paying close attention to the news all week and stocking up on supplies, just in case. I prepped our hurricane/emergency kit and we were all set for power outages and other potential circumstances. Being pretty far inland, we weren't too worried about sustained winds from the storm, but more about the gusts and potential rainfall she could bring, not to mention the fact that she was HUGE and pretty slow moving. 

We woke up Saturday to some crazy wind and just a wee bit of steady, light rain. For the majority of the day, until about 6pm, the wind roared and gusted. We actually took Lily out into it for a few minutes in the morning, so she could experience her first hurricane, and she LOVED it. She cried like crazy when we had to take her inside and spent a lot of her time at each of the doors, checking out the weather (as did the pups). Perhaps she'll be a meteorologist? 

A little later in the day, the heavy rain bands reached us and the downpours, along with the crazy wind, stayed with us until the early evening. We're lucky in that our house is not close to a big body of water, nor in a low lying location, so we didn't really worry about flooding. Our biggest concern was a tree located in our neighbor's yard. It's incredibly tall and old and tends to bend even in just a little wind, so our eyes were on it for the majority of the day. But, thankfully, it held out all day. We had some power flickers throughout the day, but never lost power (again thankfully!). We had reports of trees down around our area, but haven't seen any in our immediate vicinity so far. All in all, we were really lucky and are grateful not to have any damage.

My sister and her family are located in Virginia Beach, where her husband is stationed, and where Irene headed after she left North Carolina. Although they lost power in the evening, they were also fine and made it through the storm with no damage or flooding - again, so thankful! We heard from them this morning and everyone's doing well - they had a campout in their living room and had power back on around 8 this morning. 

Our good friends, the Fine family in Goldsboro, didn't escape Irene quite so lucky. All of them are fine, thank goodness, but they did have some damage from falling trees and are still without power. We're hoping they get it back soon (today's supposed to be fairly hot) and that there's no other damage over there and we're really thankful they're all ok.

We're waiting now to see what Irene does to the Northeast and are hoping and praying that everyone stays safe and is spared too much damage. 

I took a few pictures Friday afternoon as the storm started rolling in:

Clouds rolling in

We also took some video during the storm, but its too big for me to put on here. Instead, here are some pictures of Lily checking out he wind (in her monkey jammies) and of the sunset after the storm.