Quick Update

Thank you all again for your thoughts and prayers during this time.

We were grateful to have an electrician fix all of our electrical damage on Wednesday. So now all of our power is in working order and we have hot water again!

We still have a crew of guys here everyday tending to the tree demolition and clean up. They are making great progress, hopefully they will be finished soon.

We still need to have the phone company come out to reattach our box and lines, but thankfully they all work, they are just hanging from the house and in the yard.

To answer a question many of you have had, no, our home insurance company is not covering this damage. They cover damage done to the home, not the trees. If the home had been damaged by the trees, then they would cover that, but we are responsible for everything in the yard. I have been working very hard at the Outback to try to pay for all this damage and we have had to juggle other funds and savings around to make ends meet and pay the workers. However, once again we are grateful that the damage was not any worse than it was and that we are all safe.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ice Storm

Many of you have been concerned for us during our recent ice storm. Thank you for your prayers and concerns. We are all safe, and for now, we still have heat and some electricity. The phone company got our LAN lines up and running today, so I thought I would send you all pictures and updates on our latest natural disaster.

Sunday evening it began sleeting heavily here in OK and continued through the night. We did not sleep well because of all the noise of crashing trees. The trees here were so frozen and heavy laden with ice that they were snapping and splitting. When we woke up Monday morning, the entire outdoor world had been transformed to an ice sculpture. Some of it was quite beautiful:

The front of our house glistening with silvery icicles...

The tree limbs preserved in ice.....

However, with the beauty comes great devastation:

Here are our Bradford pear trees blooming in the spring time.

Here is the Outback Steakhouse's signature appetizer, the Bloomin' Onion.


Here are the Bradford pear trees Monday morning....note the similarity to the Bloomin' Onion...

We are grateful that none of the limbs hit our vehicles or the house itself. There are several people around town who cannot say the same. Our greatest damage was this tree in the back yard.

It snapped...

Landed on the power line...

And ripped the electrical box from the house.

We are currently awaiting an electrician to come out and reattach the box. It caused our major, 220 appliances to stop working, the back wall of the kitchen's wiring is messed up, the upstairs bathrooms have partial power and the worse part is that our hot water heater is not working. Thankfully, we have some good friends nearby who have been letting us bathe and shower at their house.

We are needing to have 5 trees removed completely due to the amount of damage they suffered. Thankfully, we have had a crew out here the past two days working on that. Also, because of the major damage all around town, the city is sending out trucks to haul off the debris, so we don't have to pay for hauling. We are also thankful that we did not suffer as much damage as others in our small town. There are several people who still do not have any electricity, many have moved into hotels during this time.

We are expecting it to snow about 6 inches tonight which will slow done the repairs around here, so it may be awhile before we have hot water again and for all of our electricity to work.

I will continue to update as things occur. For now, we are back online and our phones are in working order, so call or e-mail if you like!