This weather's been hard on us!

So much for life settling down. I was out of town last weekend at Joni and Friends camp. (I'll post about that too... eventually!) My neighbor called and told me about a really bad storm we'd had and that both of my van tires were flat. He wondered if this was standard protocol around here so no one could steal our car. :) He apparently thinks I have a lot of free time on my hands.



So I just let it go, curious about what else I'd find when I came home. I was pretty worried about my computer. Well, the pictures on the computer anyway. (Apparently not too worried, however, because I haven't backed them up yet.)

Here's what I found when I got home:

This tree was apparently struck by lightning. You can see the absence of a bunch of the bark.


It blew it off in small pieces all over the yard. We found pieces over 50 feet away!


This was on the driveway under the tire! Both tires were not just flat, but totally blown, btw. The steel bands were exposed and the tire store said they'd never seen anything like it!


This was under the other tire.


That dark spot of dirt is a small hole that must have been a spot hit because the dirt from it was all over the side of the van. Big chunks were lodged in the undercarriage too.

Thankfully Robert's boss came to swap the tires out and get them repaired for me because Robert was out of town. So then I tried to start the car...

Long story short, because it's really not interesting enough to write the long version, 5 computers in the car were fried! So $3500 later I went to pick it up yesterday at the Honda dealership and the AC wasn't working, nor were the power sliding doors or the locks. Hmm... So I'm still carless but hoping that the next time I go get it it's really ready! The service manager said he's never seen a car with this much damage from just lightning... so I've heard.

Onto the house... 2 fried tvs, two pieces of our downspout with rivets blown out and the vinyl singed/melted around them, some pieces of concrete blown out of the driveway, black marks all around the top of the garage door, a couple of damaged outlets and a blown switch.

Quite honestly, we're praising the Lord our house didn't burn down! It was after 10:00 PM and we were all out of town, so it could have gone on for a long awhile before any neighbor noticed anything wrong.


Then the day I came home we lost this branch off another big tree.


And this was our storm yesterday! That's our side yard. Thankfully we live at the top of our hill.


Here's the new creek in the backyard. (That's a concrete basketball pad that has a retaining wall on two sides.)


And our downstream neighbors (next door).

And we have 6 more days with rain and severe storms in the forecast.