Kings Island

We were at Kings Island the day of the now infamous windstorm that stemmed from Hurricane Ike. We went ahead and decided to go as the wind advisory was for 20 mph winds in late afternoon. Um yeah they were a little off as we had sustained winds of 55mph and gusts up to 75! We did stay until around 2:00 and the kids had a wonderful time. This year was much more fun for all of us since the girls were big enough to enjoy most of the kiddie rides with Brandon. They were much braver than I had anticipated. A case in point was Lainey on Plankton's Plunge...

From the left is Lainey, Brian and Brandon

They had a great time driving Diego's safari vehicles.

Swiper's Sweeper!
It took us two hours to make the half hour drive home, due to wind, trees and power lines on the road. When we arrived, naturally our power was out and we then realized that when we recently replaced our dead bolts we hadn't put the new keys on our rings and we were locked out! We usually utilize the garage door opener and never got around to the keys. As Brian walked around the house looking for the best point of entry, the rest of us remained in the van which felt as though he had added hydraulics as it bounced in the wind. I told him to pick the cheapest thing to break and do it! He ended up having to drill through one of his brand new deadbolts! It only cost the broken screwdriver, the broken drill bit and of course another deadbolt. Glad we didn't decide to just wait for the power to come back on as it was out for 48 hours. Cooking was entertaining. I made soup, perogies, burgers, chicken sandwiches, frozen veggies and all on the grill! We did miss the hot water for bathing though. Brandon had two days off of school and Brian missed three days of workdue to the power outage. Time Warner provides our phone, internet and cable and they took 8 days to get the connections restored to our neighborhood. They will soon be our former provider as every other provider had service up and running in 48 hours! I'm not trying to be cranky about it, but with Brian doing his master's online we NEED that internet!