Well, we survived Hurricane Irene here in the Poconos. I live on a hill, so I didn’t see too much in the way of flooding, although the basement is filling up faster than the sump pump can get rid of it. My neighbor across the street has a tree down and laying on his roof. Out in town, a lot of the smaller roads and a few of the main roads are closed in places due to flooding.  Jacob’s school is on one of those roads and in an area that sees a lot of flooding, so we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

According to the news, tomorrow will be the worst as far as flooding goes, with all the water running off the mountains. The Delaware River runs through my area, and that’s expected to overflow. We’ve had power interruptions, but so far no long-term blackouts at my house. Apparently, 20,000 people are without power in my town. I’m actually amazed that we’re okay, because usually our power is the first to go. Fingers crossed that it stays on! One of my DVRs got fried from the interruptions, so we’ll have to replace that tomorrow. Jake is fit to be tied because it’s the one in my mom’s room, which is basically his TV. He had about 40 episodes of Spongebob, Gumball, Fairly Odd Parents and more on there. Oh crud, and all of his Upside Down shows. Luckily all those shows repeat frequently. If a fried DVR and a few lost shows is the worst of our problems, I’m fine with that.

As of about 2pm, the rain has pretty much stopped, but the wind seems to be picking up a bit. I took a walk around my development earlier when it was more calm to see how the rest of the area fared. The creek and lake is high, there’s a little debris everywhere, and we have some new rivers in the drainage ditches. I’m happy to see that no one’s house looks damaged though, aside from the guy with the tree on his roof, but it didn’t actually hurt the house as far as I can tell.

The creek near my house. Usually it's much lower. It's almost up to the bridge.

The lake is higher than usual too, but not overflowing. I've seen worse when we've had several days of heavy rain.

I saw this little guy crossing the road. He looked ticked off when I got close. I wonder if he knows the snapping turtle that crashed my car 7 years ago? That's a story for another day though.

So, all in all, Hurricane Irene wasn’t nearly as bad as she could have been here in the Poconos. My thoughts are with all of those along the coast who got hit much harder than we did. I know it probably seems like we’re over-reacting up here to people who live though dozens of hurricanes a year, but we’re not really used to them. Just like we laugh at those down south who shut down their entire state for a dusting of snow. In the last week, we’ve had an earthquake and a hurricane, two things that we really don’t get in the Poconos. What’s next? A volcano? I shouldn’t say that, I don’t want to jinx us!