Anniversary & Halloween

We had planned to celebrate our five year anniversary by hosting a get-together at the house for games and fun, but hurricane Matthew spoiled those plans.  It took us a week or so after the storm had passed to finally make it out for our traditional dinner at Elizabeth's on 37th.  It was well worth the wait as always.  (We did make our hurricane guests watch parts of our wedding videos on our actual anniversary but we had to do so on a laptop since we had no power!)

 

 

For Halloween this year we went as this season's villains from The Walking Dead, Negan and his barbed-wire wrapped baseball bat named Lucille.  Not many people understood it, but it was easy to create! We went to a dance party at the same place where we were married.

Hurricane Damage

Although our house was relatively unscathed by Hurricane Matthew, the same cannot be said for Savannah and the Islands.  Thousands of trees came down and two thirds of Savannah lost power for several days, up to a week.  The islands flooded due to the record 12.56' tide and wind speeds reached 95mph on Tybee Island.  Mandatory evacuation orders weren't lifted until Sunday (the storm came through Friday night)  and schools stayed closed for the whole next week.  We were able to go into Savannah on Monday morning to check on our rental houses.  Most of our tenants evacuated and most of the houses escaped damage.  This is the first house we checked on.  We couldn't even drive up to it because of the massive tree across the road!

 

Thankfully, the tree fell between our house and the neighbor's.  It did take out the power lines and knock the transformer into the passenger seat of the car next door though.

 

The back house at this property just had a few little trees laid over in the yard.

 

This house had several limbs down, including one on the roof.  It had a small hole in the roof that was easily patched.

 

Our old house had a limb on it and a couple of small holes as well.

 

More limbs at this house.  One landed on the roof in the back but it was also laying on power lines, so we left that one for the professionals.

 

Can you find the house in this photo?  Once again, this tree fell without damaging either house.

 

Different view of the same tree. We let the professionals handle this one too. 

 

Nothing on the roof at this house, just this tree that fell harmlessly in the backyard.

 

After surveying damages on Monday we brought back supplies and started repairs on Tuesday.  Here's Matthew patching the roof of our old house.  I swept roofs while he repaired.

 

We were very lucky to have such minimal damages to our properties.  As you can see from this photo of the local fish mart, not everyone was so lucky.

Thanks, Matthew!

As I'm sure you're all aware of, we recently had a strong storm come through Savannah.  Hurricane Matthew was a category 2 storm when it came within 30 miles of Tybee Island, making it the strongest storm to hit this area in over 100 years.  Luckily hurricanes don't move very fast so we had plenty of time to prepare.  We secured all of our outdoor possessions and took down any dead/suspicious trees around the property the day before.

 

I also picked all of the veggies in the garden.

 

We took in several evacuees during the storm, including Windy (below), 7 cats (in addition to our 3 cats and our 2 foster kittens), 2 dogs, and 3 people.  It sure was a house full but it was nice to hang out with everyone.

 

The storm came through at night and the eye passed at about 2:00 am. I don't think any of us got much sleep!

 

The power went out around midnight on Friday night but we didn't have too much damage from the storm.  We lost one shingle on the house and two trees that fell without incident.  Mostly we just had a lot of little branches and leaves littering the yard.

 

We really gave our new generator a work out keeping the fridge and freezer going during the five days we were without power.  Meals got creative using the grill and microwave but we made it work.  We are very thankful that it wasn't worse!