Hurricanes in Ohio

Well, it has been a very exciting few days here in Ohio. This past weekend was the Cincinnati Children's Hospital International Adoption Clinic fundraiser, so I spent Thursday night and most of Saturday helping out with the silent auction preparation and then attending the event. On Friday, we hosted a shower for a co-worker at my house (which was actually super-easy since other friends handled the food and set-up and tear down). Then on Sunday we got the wind from Hurricane Ike, and were at King's Island (local amusement park) when a tree got blown down and they decided that it was probably safer for us not to be outside in 60 mph wind gusts!

So we came home to find our power out, although the good part of where we live is that we are so close to the County buildings (e.g., courthouse, police office, etc.) that we got power within a few hours. Others in the area have not been so lucky, and are being told that Saturday will be when they get their power back on. We were also fortunate that we only lost a few shingles on the roof, so we had minimal wind damage.

My work has power, so things have been progressing relatively normally (or as normally as possible when half the people you work with actually don't have power at home and there are lots of fallen trees in the woods outside work that they have been chipping the past two days). Jeremy's work, however, is one of the places still without power, so he's been going down to work in the mornings to check in and see what the story is at the plant, and then coming home to work for the rest of the day.

Meanwhile, it looks like while we had hurricanes in Ohio, there was a typhoon that hit Taiwan and washed out a bridge in the town where Elli's currently living. So it appears that she had her own wild weather fun even halfway around the globe!

We're still waiting for updates and photos for this month (I'm guessing the typhoon might delay things a bit), and we're past the mandatory 10 day waiting period for the final ruling, but not really into the "4 - 6 week" window where I can start to get really anxious to hear something soon. (Although no one seems to have told my adrenal system this news, as I sort-of leap at every phone call and check the e-mail obsessively for some word from our adoption agency!)

Hopefully we will get some news on either the update or the final ruling front soon (Jeremy and I have graciously informed God that we would be happy to forgo an update photo if we could hear on a final ruling this week. We'll see if He took a memo on that one....)!