I've been preoccupied with thoughts of Ike. I'm sad that so many towns along the coast are destroyed, and people are waiting for help. I'm wondering what it is like to be living in a huge city with not much food or water, no power, no going out after dark, and the possibility of things staying that way for weeks. I'm worried about all my friends and family in Texas, reading whatever news I can find, which seems like not much, considering the scope of the problem, and dealing with bad memories of Allison in 2001 and Katrina in 2005. I'm feeling guilty that I get to continue on with life as usual.
Stanley's parents live in eastern Texas. Stanley's dad called us as the storm came through to ask us to check weather.com and see where the eye was at the time, since they had no power and hence no Internets. It turned out the eye was directly over them. Fabulous. While I was talking to him, suggesting we get off the phone to free up the airwaves for emergency calls, he started screaming something about a tree, and then the phone went dead. That was troubling. But I talked to him later and it turned out it was the neighbor's tree, and everyone was okay.
I thought he would appreciate an image of the hurricane as it passed over their house (see photo), and he did, a lot. He's one of those dads that goes crazy for things like that. There's no telling how long it will take to get power back up where they live, so they drove to Dallas to live with Stanley's sister for a while.
I hope it's not weeks until things get back to normal. I hope to get updates from people who live in Houston. Hey maybe they can blog about it, if they aren't too busy.
3 comments:
Here's a quick update from H-town. I have not had electricity since 0230 Sat morning. The storm was loud and terrifying. Many beautiful trees are down, but Target is OPEN!
Thanks so much for the update! Hope you get electricity back soon. And thank god for Target!!! I don't know why it makes me so happy that Target is open. That reminds me, I've been meaning to go and check out some new housewares that will only be there for a couple of months or so. I may blog about it. But after I buy them, so word doesn't get out through my blog to the massive hordes of readers and then they go buy everything up before I can get to it.
When you mentioned trees, I suddenly remembered the trees along North and South Blvds, in that neighborhood next to Sassy's...you know the ones I mean. Do I want to know if they are okay? No, I don't. Don't tell me.
I hope you don't have too many issues with the power being out all over and little access to gas and food. Do you? No, don't tell me. Okay, tell me. If you do have issues, that is. What's the general mood there? Hopeful? Resigned? Bitter? Phyped? Phyped is the character string I had to type in to leave the comment.
If a person and a home survives a hurricane, then they have to deal with the power outage -- ugh, no air conditioning in the muggy heat!
When I lived in Key West, I looked at a condo building that was built to survive a category five hurricane, and had a generator for emergency power. That sounded pretty good, but then I found out the generator was only big enough to supply each unit with enough power to run a light bulb.
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