The Second Hurricane...Here's Ike!

I'm working backwards to catch up to what's been going on here. This past weekend we had our second hurricane blow thru the Ark-La-Tex when Ike passed by Tyler, Texas (about 100 miles west of us) after making landfall on the southeast Texas Gulf coast between Galveston and Houston earlier that morning. I was expecting a lot tougher time with this storm than we ended up getting. Shreveport was going to be on the northeast side of the hurricane which is the worst side to be on...expect plenty of wind and rain and spun-off tornados, the usual stuff. All we got were wind gusts up to 40 mph and a steady diet of light-to-medium rain all day into Saturday night. It was interesting to see some folks running in the neighborhood during the brief dry spells to get in some kind of workout! We also heard about a couple of friends who did a 100-mile ride in this weather as part of their training for Ironman! Not many folks can say they've ridden 100 miles during a hurricane...well, okay, it was down-graded to a tropical storm by the time they rode but it was still a wild ride!

It doesn't look too bad here but loose and rotten branches were blown out of the trees and all over the yard and the house. We'd hear loud sounds like someone was stomping around on the roof but it was really tree limbs raining down on us! This photo is during a break in the rain and Tropical Storm Ike is about 100 miles away to the west.

Looking down the driveway at the branches and pooled-up rain water. The fun part was cleaning all this up on Sunday!

The only "real" damage we suffered was losing our cable TV connection! We finally got some of it back today but we can only get basic since it looks like our cable box died over the weekend. It won't power up or anything, so it'll be returned to the company for a new one. But, seriously, we did quite well compared to other parts of Shreveport where trees fell on some houses, there were plenty of power outages, and some other damage was inflicted here and there.

When I did the 5:50 ride this morning, I noticed a few houses in certain sections of our neighborhood with no power and I could hear generators running here and there. But generally, it looked like everyone was okay. However, when I crossed 70th Street heading north I saw that Gilbert Street was completely dark. I was having to navigate down the road with the little headlight I had and by my memory of the road layout. Not really a problem but I realized how much I relied on the street lights to ride out there. The highlight was almost hitting a barricade that some kids (I assume it was dumb teenagers) placed across the street and, hitting the brakes hard, stopped about three feet from it! I saw it at the last minute in the dark and was pretty proud of how I stopped so quick without skidding. There were a few other barricades on the side of the road blocking excess to a downed power line. Some people think they're being cute doing sometime that they can't fathom could actually hurt someone. After the ride, I came back the same way and the barricade was still out in the street...cars were just driving around it. Nobody had moved it yet and you could tell from its position that it wasn't supposed to be there.

I spent the rest of the morning doing more yard work, cleaning up the leaves and such from the storm. This afternoon I got a real live massage from Amy, who Jonnene uses for her massages once a month. I had figured I needed some work on these tired muscles (I ran last night and biked this morning, for instance) and Amy put the hurt on me! She worked on my right shoulder that's been acting up lately and my left heel on the Achilles tendon which has gotten tender in the last couple of weeks. It should do some good if I get into a regular habit of this.