Sleep

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to sleep anywhere, anytime?

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I stole this from my friend Karen's blog.

My Electricity Thanksgiving

The electricity came on yesterday morning. A full one to two weeks earlier than it was supposed to. We have a deep freeze full of wonderful food that I would have been really sad to see go to waste, but luckily we had a propane generator. I have tomatoes that I grew in my own garden and blueberries that we picked this summer. We also shop every month at Sam's club and our freezer had lots of meat. Now it is only half full because we chose to eat the freezer stuff first instead of things in the pantry. We were prepared and never went hungry. And we never had to find a P.O.D. (Points of Distribution) for water, ice and MREs (Charles calls those "Meals that Refuse to Exit"). I might have actually gained weight since we were home and bored at times so we ate a little more. Charles went to work on Tuesday. I started back a half day on Friday. School is still closed and will reopen for students on Thursday next week. So he will probably go into daycare for three days. All of this because we had no electricity. We didn't go anywhere until yesterday because I didn't want to use any gas. For seven days Logan and I didn't leave our street and we were both going a little stir crazy. You still cant get gas in our town even though the power is back on. They are waiting for deliveries. That is hopefully something that FEMA will reevaluate. They need to stage more tankers next time. We even had a few stations that had generators and sold what they had but they shut down again because they couldn't get anything delivered. That seems a bit of a waste of a good generator to sit idle at a gas station. So we ventured out last night because Charles had to by some new boots for work. The town of Humble was mostly back to normal so we also decided to go out to eat at Chili's. Logan went a bit crazy! I'm sure he had low blood sugar at that point but he was so amped up about being out of our neighborhood that he couldn't stop smiling. It was really cute. But the stores closed at 8pm because the curfew was still in effect. So home we went. I am very glad we are back to normal. There are many people that lost everything and it will be a long time before they are back to normal. What is really heartbreaking is reading about the stories of people that moved here from NOLA when they lost everything in Katrina. And they show them cleaning up or loosing it all over again from Ike.

Ike Takes a Hike!

Well, we made it through! This is just a quick one to let everyone know we are okay and so is the house. Our neighborhood fared pretty well. Others just a few miles away didn't do so well. And those near the coast lost everything. We are pretty lucky as I understand Ike had a severe impact all the way to Canada. We have the yard mostly cleaned up. We never lost phone or water thankfully and our hot water is powered by propane. Our neighbors have electric hot water heaters and several have showed up at our doorstep daily with bath towel and coffee maker in hand. We have a propane powered generator and have not had a problem keeping it running like others do trying to find gas to put in it. We are not expected to get electricity back until Sept 29-Oct 5 so we are in this for a while. I am starting back to work tomorrow and a neighbor is going to watch Logan. School will be out until they get power back and we were told it is closed "until further notice." Not sure if there was any damage there or not. I do work with people that had trees go through their house so things could have been a lot worse. Our area still does not have gas either so we have to drive into Humble (about 10 miles) to get what we need as they should be back up 100% by Monday.

Now about the storm itself. Charles insisted on staying and the government people encouraged people to stay if they were not under an evacuation order so that the roads would be clear for those that HAVE to leave. But lets just say that if it is a Cat 2 or more I will probably be going. That wasn't much fun. It was loud and a bit spooky. I asked a good friend here about how she did through the storm and she said that she would never do that again. I told her that I would be glad to evacuate with her! Our husbands can fend for themselves while we take our kids on a little vacation for a few days! They can call me when the electricity is back on! Charles and Logan slept through the whole thing. At about 5 am the wind stopped and I woke Charles up to go walk the dog. We knew that we should have strong winds until the afternoon so it was really the only chance. It lasted about an hour then it started all over again.

So I will blog some more when I am off generator or have a better system set up. Just wanted to let everyone know that all is well in New Caney TX. Just a little bored with living by flashlights!

I Feel Like I Am In A Cave

Well, Ike will be here by tomorrow afternoon/evening and all the windows are boarded up. It's kind of depressing when you are in a pitch black house and you know there is sun on the other side of the windows! We have gotten a few calls and emails about whether or not we are evacuating. We are not in a low lying area and we are about 60-70 miles from the coast but it is expected that we will have winds in our area of 75-110 miles per hour and the eye is expected to whip straight over us. The Houston mayor has advised all those in sound structures who are not in an evacuation area or areas prone to flooding to stay put. His exact words in true Texas fashion were to "hunker down!" So that's what we are doing, and so are the majority of our neighbors. The hardest thing to figure out though is where to put our dog Mustard. He is an outside only dog and has only been inside our home once for a few minutes just after a bath and a vet visit. He chews everything he can get his mouth around so we are not sure what will be good. In the morning he is going on the front porch so he is a protected area, has access to use the facilities as needed and we have easy access to him. Maybe we can block him off in the kitchen somehow. Not sure but it should be fun. The cat is already in the garage and will stay there until Saturday afternoon. Charles actually has to go to work tomorrow but will hopefully get home really early. Then we will all be stuck in the house for at least 24 hours and not even able to look out the windows. Oh well. I am expecting to not have any electricity for possibly a week. When I get it back I will blog on the experience. It should be interesting!

My only pet peeve about the preparations is how unprepared people are. We have known it was heading to Texas for about 5 days and people were scrambling around today to buy everything they could including gas and water. Then they get upset that everything was gone. Hello people!!! Although I must confess, that I did go to the grocery store today. I discovered this morning that we only had two rolls of toilet paper in the house. I can live without electricity for a while but toilet paper?!! One can only take so much...