I almost forgot that I was going to announce the winner of the “What’s wrong with this shirt?” contest on the Friday of Ike.  I was …busy.  Sorry.

There were 6 contestants with the right answer:

Madam Queen-Leandra

A Screed In Time-Roger

Silly Me-Sebrina

Susan Crosby

Karilyn Hernandez

Speak Into the Mike-Mike

Here is a pic of Keelan selecting the winning name from the bowl! 

And the winner is……. Susan Crosby!  I will be getting an email to Susan ASAP and shipping her lovely prize of foot care products in the very near future.  NO.  REALLY.  There won’t be a hurricane this time. (knocking on wood, frantically…)

Thank you all for playing.  You’re all winners in my book.  Better luck next time…yada, yada, yada…

OK!  See, I finally got the long promised pictures up!  Woo-hoo!

This is Rich’s house, across the street, before the hurricane.  Take a moment and note the very last tree on the right…kind of in the background.  It is very vertical, huh?  You might even say exactly perpendicular to the ground…


Here is the corner of Rich’s house with a now somewhat diagonal pine tree looking to head toward Gene and Elsie’s house.  This is on Saturday, the next day after Ike.  It is being appraised by The Hunky Tree Guys.  Some of you out there, (ladies), may want to click and enlarge this particular shot.

As you can imagine, tree guys, hunky or no, were in great demand and raking in the cash hand over fist in the following days.  Here’s the kind of fantastic neighbor’s I have:  Gene and Elsie are gone, evacuated.  Rich paid The Hunky Tree Guys $1100.00 to do nothing but cut down the tree and just leave all these great big sections in his yard.

The Hunky Tree Guys are price gouging, big time.

Normally, the fee for this kind of job would be about $250.00 and that would include stump grinding and debris removal.  This is how busy they were.  All of this was done without Gene and Elsie’s knowledge so that the tree wouldn’t go crashing into their house the next time it rained, (later that night).  Of course they cut Rich a check for half the cost as soon as they got home and he told them what had happened.

Here is the front of our house before the storm and afterward it looked pretty much the same except for missing screens and one of the window shutters along with a buttload of branches and tree debris in the yard that we spent a long time cleaning up.

Back of our house all boarded up and cleaned off except for all the larger plants I shoved over in the corner.

Looking down the road going to my friends house…  needless to say, we didn’t go, not that day anyway.

From the car driving down the road close to our house.  Those are NOT bushes, it is manicured lawns full of tree limbs.  (Pardon the windshield wiper.)

A bit blurry, but you can see the huge root ball of the tree that just pulled up in the wind.  It’s laying over on the house.

The fuel center at John’s store.  Those are soda and newspaper machines that were tossed around like nothing.

Storm grate where I found the baby egret with it’s butt kind of down in one of those holes… I thought it was stuck there.

The baby egret, after I picked it up and carried it over to some bushes.  It was pretty small, that’s my hand there to the right of it.  I guess I could never be a professional photographer, (even if I was the least bit skilled at snapping pictures), because my first reaction upon seeing this bird was, “Stop the car!  That bird is stuck!”, and I jumped out and got it and moved it before it occurred to me to take a picture.  I could never just remove myself from the situation and photograph things.

Here is my love-bug sitting out back resting after we got through hurricane proofing the house.  We were just hanging out waiting for it to start up and noticing how weird and silent it was.