Wind Storm...

Yesterday Jayson and I headed to the gym around 4:30pm. While I was on the elliptical with my ipod in I heard this crazy rushing noise. It was so loud, I heard it over all the machines, the tv, and even my own ipod blasting in my ears. Nobody said or did anything, they were all just looking out the window. It is hard to explain, but the gym at Creighton has windows on one side, but you have to look through the glass of the indoor pool to see outside. I looked and couldn't see anything, it was just a wall of white. I thought that was weird because you can usually see some other buildings and a parking lot. Jayson came up from playing basketball to see if I knew what was going on. We watched the computer screen of the student who was working at the gym's front desk. He had a weather map up and the Omaha metro (where we were, and where we live) was purple, not red, but purple, which is worse than red. The sirens were blaring, so we decided to hang out at the gym for another 30 minutes while the storm passed. We went to the windows to check everything out and it was pouring, not raining, but pouring. So that blur of white that I saw out the window was wind and rain! Once we finally got in our car to drive home, we turned on the radio to hear that it wasn't a tornado, but a wind storm. They estimated the wind was blowing at 90 miles per hour! We couldn't get on the freeway because the entrance we needed to get on was flooded, two cars were stuck. We drove through residential streets to go home and it was crazy, there were huge trees pulled up all over the city, there was a lot of property damage to homes, and everything had leaves stuck to it from all the wind. We were hoping that our house and other car (which was parked next to a huge tree) were ok. When we pulled into our neighborhood, this is what we saw...



This tree is right next to us, I am standing on our front porch taking this picture. Thank heavens the tree fell the way it did, otherwise we would have had a tree in our bedroom window!




This tree DID fall the wrong way and ended up on our neighbor's house. This is just the opposite side of the building that we live on.





There were (and still are) ginormous piles of branches and leaves on every single corner.



This huge pine tree also fell against another building in our neighborhood. The family wasn't home, so when they got back they had a pine tree blocking their entry into their home. The clean up crew was too quick for me to get a picture, so here are the left overs...


This was the clean up crew that came today to cut down the trees. They were working on the one by our house for an hour or so, and Jayson and I were just sitting at the window like 2 nerds hooked on the discovery channel.

The power was out all of last night (starting around 5 and just kicked back this afternoon around noon). Luckily we have a gas stove that we were able to use for dinner, and we bought ice to keep our freezer stuff cold, but it makes me think that we are probably not as prepared as we need to be in case there was a real emergency.

We had also rented two movies last night and were mad that we didn't have power to watch them. We are so dependent on our power! We ended up going over to our neighbors and talking by the glow of flashlights until midnight! It was really fun.