Charley comes to visit

Sorry about the no updates. The power went out, and is still out as we speak at my house.

Wow what a storm. We got the bird room all sealed up, and hunkered down on the living room couch and watched the storm. The winds started to pick up gradually as the center of the storm got closer and closer. At one point we started to see green flashes of light, which at first I thought was lightning, but could not hear the thunder associated with them. Then I realized, as it happened at the edge of our street, it was transformer fuses blowing. After three flashes came from the end of the street (each have three fuses as far as I know) out went the power.
The wind continued to increase in the darkness, only going from east to west thankfully (the stuff in the carport would have been blown everywhere otherwise) and the huge live oak tree across the street began falling apart. The wind was fairly constant, but a huge gust would come that was frightening to watch. Each gust you could hear coming before it hit like a roar. The wind almost seemed desperate. You could hear the POP! CRACK! of branches falling off the trees that ended up being as large as 2-3 foot in diameter. One of them fell on the neighbor’s car and crushed its rear end and rear window. This went on for quite some time and the rain came down in sheets. Suddenly announcing itself before hand with the sound of a freight train about to crash on us, one final gust blew that seemed to want to rip everything from its foundations and the world strained to stay in place.

Then it was over.

We were in the eye of the storm.

The rain and wind came back after that, but it seemed paltry. A mere 30 mph wind that paled to what turned out to be 100 mph gusts we were getting.

We shined the flashlight to the road to see what we could see, but, outside of debris in the road, it was too dark to see much. And we went to bed…