Wonderful

The wonderful smell of homemade banana bread in the oven is filling my house right now. Matt and I had some bananas that had moved beyond the edible point so I whipped up some banana bread for him while he was at the softball coach's meeting tonight. I'm not a huge fan of banana bread, but the smell filling my house right now is pretty incredible. I'm excited to see how the recipe turns out because it is a new one and I was intrigued because it includes plain yogurt. I guess we will know soon how it turns out.

I stayed home from work today. I woke up at about 4am this morning and felt like I was going to be sick. I never actually got sick, but I still wasn't feeling 100% when my alarm went off at 6am. Stephanie is 38 weeks pregnant and we have an agreement in our office that we will not come to work if we are sick, so I called in. The last thing I want to do is give Stephanie the stomach flu or something like that. The good news is I don't think I have the stomach flu, but I still don't know why my stomach was so upset in the middle of the night.

Matt and I spent Friday night watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. We decided to enjoy some Chinese food to keep with the theme of the evening and then spent the evening ohhing and ahhing over the opening ceremonies. I'm a huge sucker for the Olympic Games and I usually enjoy the opening ceremonies even though some people find them boring. Friday night's ceremonies did not disappoint. The Chinese put on a wonderful show for the world and it was fantastic to see all of the athletes together for the Olympics again.

As a Olympic junkie I've been pretty attached to the television for the last couple of days. However, a DVR is an Olympic junkie's best friend - as long as you can keep up with watching. The US women's basketball team played during my workout on Saturday morning (beating China handedly) and I tried to stay caught up until I picked up my mom for some shopping on Saturday afternoon. I was in desperate need of a new work shoes - both winter and summer and I managed to find a pair of each at Yonkers on Saturday and only spent $55! I found several items at Pottery Barn I could have purchased on the spot, but held off for the time being.

After shopping I came home, watched a little more of the Olympics and then Matt and I headed to Becky and Dan's for their annual fiesta. It was a little tamer this year that it has in the past and we had a great time chatting with them, Becky's mom and playing with Josie - their chihuhua who was absolutely thrilled with all the people at her house (insert sarcasm here). Poor Josie. Interestingly enough - it was the tamest fiesta I have been to, but apparently the cops paid them a visit after we left. Isn't that how it always goes?

Yesterday, my family attended Flip's memorial service. Flip's wife Kathleen, his daughter Rachael, and sister Phyllis all traveled up from Kentucky for the service and it was nice to see them. Ron's brother Richard also attended and while I've heard many stories about him, I had never met him before. We got the chance to laugh and share stories about Ron and his life. And, as would be fitting, we ended the evening at Pizza King in CB, which was Ron's absolutely favorite. I don't think he ever returned to the area without visiting Pizza King.

Matt and I are currently wtching the US Mens' Gymnastics Team in the team competition. Holy Cow! They totally rocked it on the high bar! I love when the underdog succeeds!

Snow?...In June?...In Nebraska?.... (Warning - this is a long one)

It sure looks like snow, doesn't it? These photos were taken the evening of Friday, June 27th at about 7pm. Two hours earlier a sudden, violent, and crazy storm blew (quite literally!) through the Omaha metro area. Matt and I were not at home as we had planned to spend the evening at the Summer Arts Festival in downtown and the storm literally followed him as he drove across Omaha toward Creighton. We waited out the storm in my office and then decided to head home. We knew our house had sustained some damage before we arrived home because Matt called out neighbor, Lee, and Lee told him that our garage door was damaged along with everyone else's on our block. We managed to get home fairly quickly on the interstate, which was a surprise because we heard reports of power outages and traffic jams caused by power outages across the city. We decided to drive to my parent's house first because neither of them were home and their is very unprotected. You can see what greeted us in the picture below:

Those are hosta plants that prior to Friday night were huge, green, leafy and gorgeous. Now it looks like someone ran them through a shredder. Behind the hosta plants was this sight:

This is my parent's air conditioner - which is looks like someone took a baseball bat to it. You can see all of the dented areas.

We made our way around my parents house and except for some MAJORLY damaged plants, bushes and trees, it appeared that their house was in pretty good condition. So, we headed to our house. I'm including pictures below of some of the many sites that we found.

You can see our majorly mangled garage door. It looks like someone took both sides of it and twisted it around. My car was, at the time, stuck inside the garage and there was absolutely no way that we lift it up. The hail you see in the last picture is what was piled inside of the left side of our garage. The wind was blowing so hard that it blew rain and hail all the way to the back wall of the garage after it blew the bottom of the door inward. It also blew the cover of the opening to our attic in the garage upward and dropped the cover back down sideways.

You can also see that the storm blew one of our downspouts off and literally wrung the remainder of the downspout like a dishrag.

We found the downspout in our backyard.

The storm completely shredded the screen off of our bedroom window.

And if you look closely in this picture, you can see the leaves from our gorgeous front yard tree absolutely plastered to the side of our house :(

Matt had to use the hose to get them off.

Once we had assessed the damage outside and made a list of items to discuss with the insurance company, I headed upstairs to change my clothes so we could start some clean up and we were also going to wander around the neighborhood to see how everyone else faired.

Unfortunately, I found this in our bedroom.

Somehow, water got through our bedroom window, ran down the wall, and across the floor. We don't own a wet/dry vacuum so I headed to my parent's house to borrow theirs. I spent the next hour or so vacuuming water out of the carpet and have spent the last four days running fans in our bedroom so we don't get mold.

Matt and I certainly did not count on having to use the insurance that we arranged for last October so soon, but we certainly appreciate the necessity of it now. There was so much damage in the Omaha metro that most of the insurance companies sent catastrophy teams to the area and have been able to respond quickly. Our adjustor visited today and actually dropped a check by our house tonight. We will definitely be arranging for a new front door, a new bedroom window (there are cracks around the seal of the window) and half of our roof (the part that faces west) needs to be reshingled.

We drove around a little on Friday night and traveled to 132nd and Maple, which was completely without power because the power lines were hanging on top of buildings and trees.

The picture above is of a gas station that was hit by wind so violent that it literally shredded the metal off of the sign.

We definitely consider ourselves lucky in the grand scheme of things. Some homes in Omaha are still without power four days after the storm and some estimates indicate it could be Saturday before power is fully restored. Several of our neighbors have damage far worse than ours - windows completely broken by wind and hail, fences literally ripped from the ground or twisted a million times, outside playsets that are completely toppled, and a deck hanging from the back of a house. Our neighbor two doors down had part of his roof completely ripped off and unfortunately his ceiling fell in on Sunday sometime. And one of our neighbors about a block away just finished building a new deck on their house, only to have it hit by a huge section of the fence, and to have most of the vertical supports disappear.

And just so everyone knows, the hail was still in our yard Saturday morning.

There was a bomb threat at UNL today. Three buildings had be evacuated and searched after someone called the College of Engineering and said that there was a bomb. The College of Engineering was hosting a event this week and today there were high school students visiting campus and participating in activities that had to be moved and/or cancelled. I'm at a loss to really understand the motivation of people across the country calling in threats to college campus, schools and other places. Maybe it is one of those things that I will not ever understand.

We were given the option to leave today - I don't know of anyone who did, but campus was pretty quite this afternoon.

I wonder at what point we are supposed to take things like this seriously....