Wow, even though I'm in SE Texas (which is still hurricane country) I've been obsessed with Katrina this weekend. My best friend Mary and most of her family live in the New Orleans area... which is currently the projected bullseye for Category Four Hurricane Katrina (which was a Category 5 just a few hours ago).

I called Mary the other night, before Katrina turned into a giant monster, and asked her if they were planning on staying and they were all prepared and ready. After the last big storm in July they had bought generators for their house, plus her mothers house. They had most of the storm shutters already up on their 100 year+ home. And this week her husband even went and got her mom a shotgun (just in case).

But Sunday morning the mayor issued a mandantory evacuation of the entire New Orleans area and people began fleeing. But there aren't that many routes to get out of the New Orleans area, and all of them became instant crawling traffic jams. Mary had called and left a message this morning that she and her husband, mother, three cats and her new baby (three weeks old) would be leaving as soon as they finished securing their house. My husband wandered into my darkened bedroom about every hour or so just and gave me an unwanted update of what the storm was doing and announced each time that it was basically the end of the world (or at least the end of New Orleans as we know it). I figured I'd better get as much sleep as possible if we would be having houseguests, and after his 1:30 proclamation that she had just called and said they had just got on the road I figured I'd have plenty of time.

Finally the apocalyptic cuckoo clock (known as Sparky) took his afternoon nap and stopped bothering me and I finally got a bit of uninterrupted sleep. I got up, fiddled around some, made salad for Sparky, ate some coffeecake (it was weird food day for me again), and then decided I'd better try and give Mary a call on her cell phone to see how close they were. After five hours in the car, they'd barely made it out of the city - they had given up on getting to I-10 and were taking the 90 alternate and were almost to... Houma? Yikes, that's all? Their caravan consisted of Mary and her husband, their baby, and three alternately yowling and hissing cats in the back of the car, with her mother following them in another car. So the revised plan was to try and at least make it to Beaumont and stay with a relative. The normal, light traffic commute from New Orleans to Houston is six to seven hours, so Beaumont sounded a little saner. I asked her to call me anyway to let me know everything was OK. This was sometime around 6:30 pm.

So I spent the evening checking up on the storm on the Weather Channel online, the National Hurricane Center, and aimlessly flipping around between the various live cams on Nola.com just to see what was really going on. Couldn't concentrate on my Ebay work, didn't get much accomplished at all. By about 11:30 I thought perhaps I should try and call Mary's cell again, but I figured they'd probably made it to Beaumont and were tucked in for the night. With the new baby she's not really a late night person as she has been, but more of a crack of dawn person (not by choice). I washed some clothes, nice brainless activity, but at least it's one chore done...

3:34 am, the phone rings. Sparky is snoozing in the next room but I'm still puttering at the computer. 504 area code on the caller ID, New Orleans, wow it's Mary! Are they in town? No, they are just now approaching Beaumont (which is a few miles inside the border of Texas), OMG! They have been in the car, inching along for like fourteen hours. The baby has been quiet, apparently she likes the motion of the car. One of the cats has been nonstop meowing pretty much the entire time, resulting in occasional hissing from one of the other cats. But, bless her little heart, Mary is still in a decent mood, she really is one of the most resilient people I know. And she's got an abnormal amount of endurance and apparently patience. And her husband was now driving her mom's car until they made it to a stopping place. Mom's got a lot of pep too, but it's 3:30 on the frigging morning...

Well, at least I know where they are now, it's 5:30 am now so hopefully they are in bed by now. Now if Katrina will behave and just move on through without stalling or destroying too much property. Did I mention Mary and her husband just spent the last three years or so non-stop renovating their Victorian home? It's really beautiful. And it actually sits in one of the higher areas (for New Orleans) where serious flooding is rare... Fingers crossed, and now I lay me down to.. sleep?