We’re back, as promised, to give you the low down on our Irene experience. The storm started to pick up early Saturday morning. According to The Weather Channel, the storm wasn’t even near us yet, but it already looked like this outside:

Yeah, not a good sign.

As the day went on, the wind got more and more violent. Pretty early in the day, the power went out, so the menu of the evening consisted of cold Spaghetti O’s. I’m not complaining about the cuisine, though. It made me feel like I was 6 again (in a fun way).

When it came time to trying to go to sleep, we didn’t want to sleep in our bedroom because there are three huge trees right outside our window. After hearing all the reports of fallen trees, sleeping in our bedroom was not an option. Pretty much every room in the house was in the “tree falling zone”, but we finally decided to set up camp in the kitchen. There used to be a wall dividing the kitchen and the family room. Since it was a load-bearing wall, when the previous owners took it down, they replaced the wall with steel beam. We figured putting that between us and the trees was a good move, so we moved the couch and loveseat in there to act as our “beds”. Here was the ultra-messy scene the next morning:

The next morning, we woke up the sound of chainsaws outside and immediately joined the rest of the neighborhood assessing the damage. The front and back yard had a good amount of debris lying around, including some huge limbs, but thankfully the house was unscathed.

We only had one tree go down on our property. One of our neighbor’s trees broke through his fence and landed in our driveway:

The pictures don’t really capture how big the tree was. It was pretty hefty:

Here’s a photo of our house my Aunt Dee Dee took with her cell phone during the storm, from my parent’s house across the street:

This damage paled in comparison to what some other families in the neighborhood experienced:

We decided to hop in the car and take a drive around town to check out our stomping grounds. Here are a few photos my aunt snapped with her cell phone:

While we were driving around, we saw a team of Dominion Power workers removing tress from the power lines. The thought of having our power back on made me extremely happy. So happy I wanted to yell “I LOVE YOU!!!” out the car window.

Thankfully, our power came back on Sunday night – which made us two happy campers! With all of the down lines we saw around the area, we were shocked (and incredibly excited) that it came back on so fast. Some of our friends’ power came back on for a few hours, but it ended up going out again and they’ve been without power ever since. As for here, so far, so good.