A Windy Night in Houston

So we're just sort of sitting around waiting for the rain to start and the power to go out. Sparky is hoping it will stay on till at least 11 pm so we can watch Bill Maher's show tonight. The winds have been whipping around pretty energetically since late afternoon, glad we had the trees trimmed back. The local weather guy has been taking frantic phone calls from people non-stop, as well as the mayor and some other city and meteorology officials, but I'm tired of watching them all.

The streets (and apparently the freeways also) are now clear, it's very eerie not t see cars going past our house, we live on a pretty busy through street.

I just spoke to my NOLA friend who evacuated to the town of Franklin, Louisiana, she has the most amazing cell phone, mine barely works in good weather. They're without power and it been raining all afternoon, but so far so good. Looking at the latest satellite pics, Rita is just sort of skimming the coast of Louisiana on it's way to knock out the Golden Triangle of Texas, home to a large number of oil refineries and a huge port operation.

We've cooked up as much as we could from the freezer, eaten the rest of the ice cream (that's what my friend was doing also when I spoke with her). I wish I were hungrier, out of habit I bought some Hershey's Milkshakes that will go bad if the power is out too long (Vanilla Cream, yumm), and some yoghurt.

Our bathtub is filled with water (we had to manually plug it up, we both forgot the stopper is broken dammit). We have several recycling bins full of water byt Sparky insists on leaving them outside (he's afraid they will spill). We've got our flashlights and a couple of those little touchlights stationed around the house. After the last power outage I actually an Energizer portable lamp (so I might be able to actually read in the dark).

The cat is normally calm during storms but even she can tell this is not a normal storm coming. She perches on the back of the couch, listening to the house creak.

I've answered all of my Ebay emails I could and put a little banner on my storefront to let people know if my email bounces or I don't answer, to please be patient with me for a few days. With all this preparation, my hope is that nothing at all will happen. I tend to overprepare for things, I overpack like crazy for trips, but I know the one time I underprepare I'll be screwed. Better to look like an idiot with too much stuff, IMHO.

Sparky just saw on the news where all of the FEMA trucks are arriving at Reliant Park (aka the Astrodome area) so they'll be ready to move on into the storm damaged areas. Got to make it look good this time, though I would think that would only just piss off the Katrina victims more. We had our first major Rita-related catastrophe today, a busload of senior citizens, evacuating from my part of town (my aunt had stayed at the same nursing home before she died), were basically burned alive when their bus caught on fire and all of their oxygen tanks blew up. That was the first news I heard when Sparky woke me up this morning (can he possibly be the bearer of GOOD news for a change???).

I'm making "to do" list to keep for the next killer storm. Things we should have but don't - an Igloo cooler (we thought we had one, but I think it was tossed several years ago), some duct tape and heavy plastic in case of glass breakage, more snacks that don't require heating (more PopTarts, maybe some cookies, pastries), more HandiWipes, some sort of protein (beef jerky or something), and even more flashlights and batteries.

Oh well, gotta go, probably getting close to time to unplug the computer...

Posted by Morticia at September 23, 2005 09:16 PM | TrackBack