December Winds and Brent's TREATS

The beginning of December brought a HUGE east wind storm. The winds blew, and they blew, and they blew. The winds started during the night sometime... honestly I felt like I was awake most of the night listening to the wind damage. As I lay in bed I kept wondering what was being destroyed outside... because it was pretty obvious from the noises that there was destruction happening. I was so glad when it was finally light enough outside to look out and see what was going on! Our neighbor's siding was being torn off their house, a few neighbors around us were loosing shingles, and our fence had blown though. The entire house was shaking from the forces of the wind... the floor just vibrated and walls rattled. Before Brent left for work I told him I was worried our windows might shatter in the winds. That was a big mistake. He informed me that the windows were actually the strongest thing on our house and then went into graphic detail about houses can collapse or get suctioned apart during high winds. That was comforting. For the rest of the day I imagined our house imploding with me inside.

The storm did cause a lot of damage and some parts of town were without power for DAYS. Luckily the storm did not cause any deaths... but there were some injuries (JoyAnne has some pretty sad, yet funny stories about people getting injured up at Weber State... and she SWEARS that the nursing students were practicing their skills on the injured...).

Every home in our ward was damaged in some way from the winds... our neighborhood looked like a war zone. Lucky for us our only major damage was our gate (broken beyond repair), our fence (hopefully can be repaired), our downspout (which has fallen off our house before, and our patio table. All very minor damaged when compared with others around us. The patio table did give me a scare though. I walked out on our back patio and saw the table MISSING (and our grill was in a different place than we had left it... I swear the wind must have pushed it a little). Anyway I was so worried that our table had blown out of our yard and must be causing damage to neighboring homes... I could just imagine it flying around breaking windows, denting cars, running over small children. Luckily I found the table buried under pieces of our fence... in a million pieces (I think it must have hit the fence with a lot of power because there were some fence pieces that were missing chunks of vinyl where the table must have crashed into them). I was sad to lose our old, trusty, dirty table, but I was sure glad it had stayed in our backyard and not caused others damage!

Here is a view of our fence below... honestly its been fun to be able to see our neighbors' yards! Our cute neighbor next door was having the time of his life running through the missing fence pieces and thought it would be the best idea in the world to leave the fence down and just have one massive yard... he even volunteered to mow it all! I thought it was a great idea! The bottom right picture shows our table... buried under the fence pieces and some fire wood.
The storm caused a lot of excitement... and I'm pretty sure it created a lot of great business for roofers and fencers! Just a few days after the storm another big wind storm was supposed to hit. Church was reduced to one hour so we could all go home and clean up our yards from debris that might cause more damage should the second storm hit. That was seriously a neat experience! I got to know some neighbors I have NEVER talked to and I was really impressed by examples of people in our neighborhood. It was so fun to walk around and see everyone helping one another. I saw an older single woman out helping neighbors and another woman who has a hard time walking or bending over (much less carrying things while she walks)... she was out helping pick up tree limbs in her neighbor's yard!

Since the city was in a state of emergency to clean up debris before the second storm hit (which... by the way, did NOT come to pass...) a temporary waste site was created in West Kaysville (not sure how the residents around the dump site felt about this "dumping ground" to protect our homes and put their homes at risk of flying objects... Anyway the picture below is the line of cars driving AWAY from the dump site and returning to the east side of the highway.

Here are some pictures of the temporary dump site.... I thought it was fascinating to see the mounds and mounds of tree limbs and fences and other debris! Everywhere you looked there were trucks/SUVs in every direction backing up and dumping debris. There were even tractors moving and pushing the debris to break it up and load it into National Guard trucks to haul it to the official dump. There were a few police officers on site... they were taking pictures... made me laugh! It was pretty much a big free-for-all! The top middle picture is my Dad and Brent (my dad is standing ON TOP of our trailer full of debris... pretty sure it was VERY dangerous! There were a few times the pile would shift and I thought my Dad was going to tumble down. I think that man needs a repelling rope and anchors for Christmas for occasions like this!) Kris is in the bottom middle picture.

P.S. Kris finally finished chemo the end of October. Wahoo! He got pretty sick by the end... I have a new appreciation for people going through chemo and radiation! He had an ice cream party to celebrate. He has gone in for some tests over the last month and everything looks outstanding! Yippee!

So... Brent has been coming home from work with TREATS! Talk about COOL! He got this ginormous gift basket of CHOCOLATE items from a client (yah... trust me it is GINORMOUS, the picture doesn't do it justice) AND he came home with a HAM from another client! How cool is that?! I feel like we should be on "The Christmas Carol" getting a PROFESSIONAL gift like a ham!! (And as an extra perk... if you look closely you can see how well our pantry is organized... maybe I should make that one of my New Year goals to clean... or maybe I should just keep the door closed so no one sees how messy it is.)