Ice Storm

We have survived yet another Oklahoma ice storm, although this one is supposed to be the worst in the state's history. For those not in the area, it started out with freezing rain this past Sunday morning. By the middle of the night Sunday night, Monday morning, you could hear cracking noises outside. Around 3 or 4 in the morning, branches started falling out of the trees, and continued through the day Monday. These photos are of one of the trees in our front yard and of our back yard. The last photo is of one of our neighbor's house. By Tuesday the ice was starting to melt off of the trees, so they didn't have so much weight to bear. Unfortunately, so much damage has been done we are afraid we may lose at least one of our trees completely. We have five big trees on our lot, all of them about 50 years old. We love these trees, and they were a big factor in why we fell in love with our house.

Fortunately we never lost power, other than a flicker here and there. The power company came through last spring and buried all of the lines in our neighborhood, and from what we hear, we were one of the few neighborhoods in the area not to lose power. Some neighborhoods have been fighting the power company, including lawsuits, to prevent the power lines being buried because they don't want the green boxes in their front yards. Personally, we would much rather live with a green box than be without heat and lights, especially with having two young children.

My office, in fact the entire building my company is in, is shut down, probably until the middle of next week. They were able to get in and move our servers off site to someplace with power so I can log in to the network and get critical work done. However, we don't have Internet access (or cable TV) at home yet. My husband's company re-opened yesterday, and day care opened today. I am hanging out at my my husband's office today getting caught up on work and life in general.

All in all, we are very thankful we sustained no damage to our house or cars and have had power and heat. Hopefully they can restore power to as many as possible today and tomorrow; they are predicting another storm coming in tomorrow night through Saturday. It is to be more freezing rain and/or 1-6 inches of snow.