Windstorm

On Thursday we had a huge windstorm. The weather people said there were winds blowing at 95 miles per hour. These were the fastest winds that I'd ever felt.

Awoken on Thursday morning by the loud winds, my family had to go through and around the whole house to make sure everything was secure. After doing that, I went to school where all the students who came were sent to the gym. There was no power and they had emergency lights running on an auxiliary generator. Everyone was wondering around, talking with friends and texting, and wondering what we were going to do. They made an announcement saying, "Everyone will go to their 1st period and then we'll figure out what we are going to do." So, I went to Seminary where we held a disruptive devotional. After Seminary we were told to go to our 2nd period, but when we got there the teacher said that she wasn't going to hold class because there wasn't enough students there. My friend and I decided we would go and check with our other teachers to figure out what to do when an administrator, who wasn't very nice about it, told us to go to our 2nd period class. We went back, but as I was walking in the door of the classroom a my friends sister came and got me saying that her mom was here to pick me up. I left the school with them, and we stayed at their house until my parents picked my brother and I up.

By now the storm had dissipated a little bit, and we began cleaning up our yard. Two trees had fallen into our yard from two other neighbors' yards. One was part of a huge willow tree that had bent the chain-link fence in the backyard. My brothers and I cleaned most of that up by ourselves. The neighbor next door had hired someone to clean up the pine tree that had smashed through their vinyl fence into our front yard, and it had been close to hitting my parents bedroom. The worker said, "I'll finish up tomorrow and have your yard cleaned up by morning." He never showed up and my dad was pretty mad about that. We ended up doing it ourselves.

Our house had lost power sometime on Wednesday night, and we had to deal with that the whole day. We couldn't open the refrigerator, had to use flashlights in the house, and didn't really do anything but clean up the yard. We spent that night in front of the fireplace sleeping in makeshift beds and sleeping bags. The power came back on sometime in the morning, and I woke up to find my brother playing Xbox, which I wasn't really surprised to see.

Our ward spent the whole weekend cleaning up the neighborhood. We cut down trees, hauled away debris to the dump, and cleaned up yards. Church was even cancelled on Sunday to do this. I went to a practice for a Christmas choir thinking that I had a lot of meetings to go to, but we were told that they were all cancelled. Instead, we would finish up taking away debris because there was supposed to be another, but smaller, windstorm that night, and we didn't want things blowing away. We've finished up most of it, and I've just now realized all the things I have to do for school. There's a term project check for Science (which I haven't started), reading for English, and I have a test in math on Tuesday.