Well, since it is over 36 hours later, you can guess what happened. What follows ia a long story, so for those who just want the short story, I'm fine, my wife and kids are fine, and we had no damage.

Now for the long story. About 10 minutes after my last post (which by the way shows that there is a bug in BlogCFC since the link isn't working), I was outside with my wife. The wind was growing quite strong. We were looking at the tree that fell down a few hours away when we heard a big boom behind us. We went inside and the power died, almost exactly at minute.

So - I paced around the house a bit, pacing till about 1AM. At that point, the wind was very, very strong and the rain was horizontal. I decided at that point that there wasn't much I could do. I had all the kids in our master bedroom so I decided to rest. As soon as I got in bed, a transformer behind the house started sparking. That was enough to freak me out, so I just went to the window and watched. There are some large trees around the house, and I was pretty worried one or more would fall. Then I heard it. The sound of wood creaking very, very loudly. It seemed to be to the left of me, and with the wind going to the left, I wasn't too worried. Then a large tree directly across from the window, about 50 feet away, started to learn, quite deeply, towards our house. That was enough for me to get my wife up and bring the kids to the center of the house.

So, I spent the new few hours sleeping off and on, watching the trees, checking the house, and generaly just being nervous as hell. The sky, at 1AM, was almost as bright as what you see right before dawn. Around 6 I figured I wouldn't get any more sleep so I started listening to the radio.

Lake Charles, which is to the west of us, was hit a lot harder. Lafayette was very lucky. The tree that fell down the street just barely touched the house across the road, and when I say barely, I mean the leafs were "tickling" the garage door. The yard was a mess. I have pictures I'll post tomorrow, but basically we were completely covered in small brnaches and leaves. But zero damage to the house. We were able to clean the yard.

By 5PM yesterday, the radio was saying that 23,000 people had been without power in Lafayette, but there were only 3000 people left. I had high hopes. What I didn't know is that the power company wasn't going to work 24/7, but took off 10. So - I got to enjoy sleeping without AC. Now, I know what you're thinking. It's Fall. It's almost October. Unfortunately, Fall for the Deep South simply means the end of "Ludicrous" Heat and the beginning of "Ridiculous" Heat. However - with getting almost no sleep the night before, I slept like a baby, for a good 10 hours.

This morning I woke up and began to finish up the yard work. The power company drove by around ten and began working around the street. Almost exactly at noon we got power back.

So, as I said, we got lucky. Our only real "loss" was alot of food, but almost all of our frozen meat stayed frozen. I'm going to rest up today, watch the Saints lose, and just cool off. Next time - I'm evacuating. I'm just way too much of a wimp to go through that again.