I hope you will pardon an off poker post but this Hurricane Ike is taking over our lives right now.  We are sitting at home watching the constant news coverage of impending doom for our city.  Gyla has taped up the windows.  That’s what you do to protect yourself from shattering glass.  I don’t know if it works or not but it is what you DO during a hurricane.  It may be like the old story of the woman who cut the ends off her roasts because her Mom did it.  I don’t know but we did it so I guess we are ready.

Gyla also went and bought a generator yesterday.  Everyone needs one, right?  She has bad asthma and cannot be without her breathing machine if we are without electricity for a long time.

Our refrigerator (it will run on the generator) and pantry are stocked with Hurricane essentials like Twinkies and Ding Dongs.  I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I ate a Ding Dong but I’ll tell you that I didn’t know that they weren’t wrapped in foil anymore.  How do you make foil balls??????  I have great memories of the kids and their foil balls in times past.

My son works for the local NBC affiliate in their news room.  He called a little while ago to see if we needed him to help us with anything.  He’s off today but has to go in at 3 am.  That will be in the middle of the storm so he will be going in early and catching some z’s up there.  I know he will be safe.  That place is a fortress and it will have electricity.  He will have air conditioning.  I imagine he’ll be spending a lot of time up there.  During Rita they allowed their staff to bring up their family but not this time.

Gyla is running around plugging in everything that needs to be charged.  She says she is running out of plugs.  Life has gotten complicated with all our cell phones, portable computers, hand held games, etc.  Last night we stopped in the Verizon store to get a car charger for my phone.  The guy tried to cell us a wireless card for our computer at $59 a month.  He says we can watch the local news on it after the power goes out.  The problem would be charging the computer battery after it runs down.  We decided to pass.  We will just have to go compterless when we get to that point.

I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes before but the last one for me was Hurricane Camille.  I had just graduated from high school when that baby struck.  It was one big hurricane.  It came in so fast that my boyfriend at the time got stranded at our house.  I had a gall bladder attack in the middle of the storm and couldn’t get to the hospital.  It was really bad.  That was the closest we came to flooding.  The aftermath was terrible.  There was a huge mess everywhere and the heat was incredible.

We are safe here.  Or should be anyway.  We live in NorthWest Houston.  On the map you would see it as Jersey Village.  All the warnings about facing “iminent death” are directed at the areas around the coast.  There are still those crazy human beings who decide to ride out the storms in evacuated areas.  I hope there won’t be many lost in this storm. 

We actually got a call asking us NOT to evacuate.  The problem is there are 6,000,000 people in Houston.  We can’t all leave.  They want the roads cleared for those that have to leave.  We could have left this morning.  The roads were clear.  We have decided to stay in case there are problems we can deal with them right away.  If the drainage system lets us down and we have rising water we want to be here to get stuff up.  It will be a miserable time of it but we can save a lot of things.

I’ll blog here as long as we have electricity.  Right now the sky is clear.  There is a slight wind.  Gyla says the first rain is showing up on the radar.  Parts of Galveston island are already flooded.  They are expecting devestation down there.   I hope everyone leaves.

More later.

Janice

Sept 12, 2009  11:10 am