Hurricane Ike: Friday Afternoon and Evening

I know this may not be interesting anymore because all we have seen for the past weeks is footage of Hurricane Ike, but for my "blogging" purposes I still need to post pictures and commentary about the storm. My last post left off about 1:30 in the afternoon Friday before the storm.

This is about 3:15pm- At this point we were pretty much just sitting at home waiting the the skies to change. It started sprinkling a little bit and the winds were picking up.
Our neighbors banana trees were really blowing at times with some strong gusts. Jace loves to go outside and point out the bananas. Apparently banana trees are pretty hearty trees and even if they do break, they will grow back with no problems.
5:05 pm- We decided to go get the mail and feel how strong the wind was getting because we could really hear it from inside our house. For most of the walk, Jace's hair was blowing but I liked this picture better because of his cute face.
Just slightly darker skies....
and thicker clouds.
About 7:30pm-By this point, city officials were issuing curfews all over Houston so people would stay safe inside. In Missouri City, our curfew was dusk till dawn so J and I went outside for one more round of pictures. The skies were beautiful. This is the view looking down our street through the trees. Winds were still about the same as before, sometimes calm and at other times gusting. Around this time of night we kept thinking, "I can't believe we are staying". We had no idea what to expect. We were both excited with anticipation with what a hurricane was like, but wondered if we should be more concerned than we were.

View from our backyard. The clouds were much darker and our tall crepe myrtles(sp?) trees were really blowing.
We really were excited. This experience was very entertaining for us both. My eyes really hurt that night which doesn't really matter except for that is why I was wearing my glasses.
About 7:36 pm- Literally only 6 minutes after those last pictures taken of the sky, the sunset turned even more stunning. We probably took a million pictures because it was so striking.
The lower clouds were moving so fast, it just showed us how quick the storm was coming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGRqcaWkRQs Here is a video we took.

9:15 pm-My last time outside before the storm. We decided to sleep in our guest room to be close to Jace when the power went out because everyone told us that it was destined to for sure. We had flashlights next to us and both quickly fell asleep around 11:30pm. ( I have other videos but they are having trouble uploading so if I can get them too, I'll include them later.)