Almost Hurricane in Tempe!

It all started on Thursday night August 28th. (This happens to be my cousin's birthday too). We were at home watching TV when the newsflash/warning came across the bottom of the TV for Maricopa County. Jason checks outside and there's some lightening and the trees are blowing hard. He advises that we turn off the TV just in case-it's not plugged into a surge protector. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes afterward, the electricity goes off! Shortly afterward we hear sirens, they end up on Hardy Dr in front of our apartment! Some trees and fallen down and knocked out a power line. The sidewalk to our parking spot was flooded to about ankle-deep, so I had Jason go out and check things out. He got someone to take a pic of him by a fallen tree in front of our apartment.

Our neighbor, who happens to be our Ward's Elder's Quorum President, came over to make sure we were alright. He invited us over to his place to wait out the storm-at least until power came on. Since it was flooded pretty bad, Jason pulled us in this heavy duty wagon that we have.
Here's the 3 of us at the Griffin's house playing the dice game, "SNARF", but the other neighbors that brought it call it by a different name.

We got done with the game, but everything was still down, so we decided to go ahead back home. Here's a picture of us where a tree branch broke and fell into our "assigned" parking spot-good thing we didn't park there this night or else we would've most likely had damage to the hood of the car!!! WHEW! Savannah fell asleep while over at the Griffin's and stayed asleep on the ride home. She was tired.

Here you can get a glimpse of the flooding-though it's not really doing justice in the dark. It really is deep! I promise! The next morning Jason got up around 5 to get ready for work and the electricity was not back on yet, so he stayed home with us. Here's the tree that fell on the street in front of our place. Hardy Dr was blocked off from 5th St to 1st St. We almost wouldn't have been able to get out of the aparment because the crew would be working on the tree, so all of us in the apartment complex had to move our cars down the street. Walking back from where I had to park, I saw so many trees that fell down, some even pulled out at the roots! That's how powerful it was.Here's a tree that fell down on one of the buildings in my apartment complex, you can see that it fell down on the roof. Luckily there wasn't much damage to the place. We didn't get to have electricity back until sometime Saturday morning. We stayed over at our friends' house, Greg & Brenda Geisler, on Friday night. They were so sweet to let us crash at their place last minute.

So needless to say, our Labor Day weekend started out with a BANG!