The Remains of Ike

Well. What can I say. He came slowly and left quickly, at least relatively speaking.

Here's my "hurricane report":

It was one hell of a storm, but thankfully didn't do nearly as much damage in our area as we feared. I think we had some uprooted trees and such, and parts of the city lost power temporarily (mine was out only briefly). All this is mostly due to the fact that we were lucky and remained on the "good" side of the storm (to the West of it), and thus didn't get as many of the really terrible winds and no tornadoes, as far as I know.

I do feel for all the people in Galveston, Houston and East TX, who got the worst of the storm. Many of them had to suffer devastating damages, and even if they made it through okay, millions (!) are currently without power. I hope that they will get help soon.

What I find remarkable is the fact that this storm actually managed to maintain Hurricane status for the entire time from landfall until it had passed our area (it was an H 1 here). For reference - we are about 150 miles inland from Galveston!
Most storms get downgraded to a tropical storm pretty quickly after they hit the land, but apparently that was not Ike's plan...I think it was just too big and was able to maintain the wind strengths needed.
If you haven't seen these yet - this is a picture of Ike when it was still in the Gulf on Thursday. The sheer size of it is crazy. This one is another shot from yesterday afternoon, as it was nearing the coast. The storm was actually about the size of Texas. Really unbelievable.

All day yesterday one could feel the winds picking up, though it remained nice and sunny all day long (as you can see on yesterday's blip).

But things were definitely starting to get a little more definitive throughout the night - needless to say, I didn't sleep all that much. By about 5 am this morning, the bad parts of it had arrived and we were starting to see very strong winds and rain. This continued to increase until it peaked at around 9 am, I would say, and then it got better fairly quickly. By early afternoon, things were looking much better already, and now everything is calm again.

Now, I admit cheated a little with the picture I blipped, because the one you see here is actually a shot to the West of us, though Ike left us to the Northeast...but this picture is so much nicer than the other one ;-)))
However, if you click on this one, you will actually see leftover Ike clouds in the far sky. It just wasn't as impressive, and I think you'll understand why I didn't venture out to take a shot at it while it actually was in an impressive state!!!