The End of Hurricane-Ville.... for now

So, as requested, I mean... nagged, by my nephew... here are some pictures of the big hurricane. Please be warned that some of them may be too graphic for younger readers. I mean, when that cow flew by in 95 mph winds, it was just luck that I was standing there with my camera. But when he hit the side of a tree, I mean... I owed it to my public to take pictures of it!

HA! Totally kidding. By the time Gustav joined us here in West Central Louisiana, he had died down enough that only a few isolated areas had much damage or power outage. Some places even today still have power outages, but here on the army base we're doing just fine. I've been through squalls three times as bad as that growing up in southern Wisconsin. The kids and I even spent part of the day playing outside. The worst of it came on Monday night when it was too dark to take pictures. That's when we had a few good gusts of wind that knocked a couple branches off the trees. Other than that, it was very uneventful. And now I have many cases of water and canned food. I guess it will all come in handy if Ike or Hannah or Tina, or whoever decides to take a tour of the Gulf sometime soon. Hurricane season in the Gulf has just begun!



Here's how we spent the day on Monday when the base was shut down and we were technically supposed to stay in our houses.

~When we woke up Monday morning, the storm hadn't really made landfall yet, but we were getting rain from the outer "rings"~

~Throughout the day the rain picked up. By nighttime we had a pretty good, steady rain. "Raining buckets", Drew said when he went to bed.~

~We made Rainbow Crayons to put some color in our gray day. And use up a few of the million broken crayons we have.~

~And we took a nap!~

~And we all painted some boxes we bought at Michael's. Drew has a box that looks like a book, Hunter picked out a triangle, and Louisa has a pretty box. I painted some magazine holders that look like cute houses!~

And that's pretty much all the excitement that came out of our visit with Gustav. He gave us two days off from school, and closed down a 24 hour Super Wal Mart for 3 days.... Although we can't forget that Gustav was a deadly a hurricane. And in all the fun I have with it, I'm very sorry for those whose lives are changed drastically because of it. I thank God that New Orleans was spared, and pray the rest of the hurricane season is uneventful for them. Because they don't need any more water surges to test the levees that aren't even finished yet.