I REALLY hate to admit this, but I actually like this origami stuff. It is fun even though my child has yet to figure out what I am sending her. Her exact comment on the first day when I sent the goldfish, "Why didn't you write on it?" I don't mean to be critical, but she can NOT read!! I put a little "I ♥ U" on the dolphin and even though she could not identify on the first try what it was, she did seem to like it.
Here are my attempts for next week...
A frog (labeled), worm, flower (it was supposed to be an iris, but I didn't have purple paper), and a swallow. I wrote or drew on them BEFORE folding so I should be covered all around. I am waiting for the note from the teacher that will tell me to stop sending such things to school because they cause a distraction. So far, so good though!!
For Julie- A Hurricane Irene Account : For us, it was a big bunch of nothing (thank goodness!) I spent Friday grumbling and marveling at the idea of having to go through this again. We spent Saturday drinking and getting ready. We cleared our deck, Eric tied down the grill and other outdoor things that could not be brought in, I packed the girls a bag just in case something did happen. I spent a ridiculous amount of time watching the news.
Saturday night we discussed sleeping in the basement since we do have a lot of huge trees around our house, but they kept pushing back the actual time of arrival. When we went to bed we were suppose to get the worst of it around 5AM. We have the biggest windows in our bedroom and the girls' windows are pretty small, so we felt like they were safe and that they could get a good night's sleep in their own beds before the storm even hit. I expected to be woken up in the middle of the night with the sound of rain or wind.
What happened: nothing. I was not woken up. There was wind and rain through out the night, but not as bad as we had had here before when I had been woken up by the sound of the wind blowing through the trees and against the windows. We had plenty of rain (hence the bad flooding in NJ) but other than a yard that looked like a pond we were fine. We had no standing water on the road afterward. We had a bit of water in the basement at a window the previous owners had boarded up but that was soaked up by a max of 5 towels.
We spent Sunday inside due to the rain and the wind. The wind that scared me came in the afternoon. I watched limbs sway very close to my window, but we got lucky. We saw plenty of neighbors out walking around on Sunday, but we stayed inside since even a small branch coming at you or your kid or your dog at high speed would hurt like the devil. We also never lost power, so we could watch TV (news for me, movies for the kids) ALL DAY LONG!!
I will say this though just to give praise where praise is due: our neighbor, a lovely woman who has been so helpful ever since the day we moved, called to check on us. She hadn't seen us out and wanted to make sure we were OK. She had remembered that E was gone during that really bad snow storm (as was her husband) and had feared that he was gone again. With this phone call I did learn that other neighbors had not been so fortunate. At least one house on our circle had two trees down, one of which had landed on the house causing some damage.
On Monday we walked around our circle and found that several families had gotten enough water in the basement to cause them to pull out carpet, sheet rock, belongings. We also found out another neighbor had a tree land on her deck. So, we really were lucky. E's office building which is just 10 minutes away was without power for several days as were some other neighbors just one or two streets away. The worst though was all of the towns near the rivers. They just got hit with the rising water. It didn't help that we kept getting rain off and on for a week or more.
This experience was nothing like Hurricane Ike for us. This was a two/three day experience. At the end of the week everything for us was back to normal and it felt like ages since we even worried about it. With Ike, we went to the Woodlands a couple of days before the storm (at least a day before the mandatory evacuation) and had no power for over a week. There was no gas, no stores opened with Ike, here many things were open on Sunday even before the storm had completely past (this is just hearsay since we stayed put). With Ike, we were desperate for news from other friends and neighbors, but this time we were not near an evacuation zone so we didn't have that worry. Just like now, we got lucky with Ike and only had a little damage like small trees leaning. We eventually got one side of our fence redone, but really that was because the next-door neighbor had to have his fence redone and he wanted the entire fence redone not just two out of three sides. I just don't think we were as close to it this time as with Ike. This one was not as big of a storm, downgraded to a tropical storm when it hit landfall here on Coney Island, about an hour from us, verses a Cat. 2 hitting about 20 min. from our house (and yours) in TX. Irene was a huge storm, area speaking, and we got a lot of rain from the northern section of it many, many hours before it made landfall near us. It actually made land fall in South Jersey as a Cat.1.
And that is my Irene story. I hope to never have another :)
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