Month: September 2005

In case you were wondering where I live in relation to Galveston, we are here. Well, if you turned left at the star and went through one traffic signal. But that is close enough!

The Chronicle is looking for bloggers that plan to stay in Houston and ride out the storm. Details on how to be a “Stormwatcher” listed on the Rita Blog site.

We talked about it some more last night, and talked about it again this morning after watching the news, and we realized … there is no point to staying here in Houston. We either get to have a fun little weekend road trip because no storm hit (crazy things have been known to happen), or we are safe, sound, and dry far away from here. So we are heading to Austin, where the “Hacker House for Wayward Girls” is now going to be the “Hacker House for Wayward Geeks”. Our schools have all been cancelled, Mike’s office has closed – it is time to go.

It is strange to walk through the house and think about what we will be taking with us. I’ve packed the important documents. The pets are coming with us. We’ll take the laptops and the external hard drive with the backup of the main computer. I’ll be packing up the photographs – everything I can get my hands on. My textbooks. Jason wants the X-Box. Yarn. Obviously clothes & makeup. A few old cookbooks that we got from Mike’s Great Aunt Yvonne, who might have lost all of her others in Hurricane Katrina.

After that, I don’t know what to pack. Everything else can be replaced. As long as we are safe, that is what matters most.

Funny how all of this “stuff” doesn’t matter quite so much when you can only take a few items with you. I have a feeling I’ll be doing another house purge when I get home.

Galveston has now issued a mandatory evacuation and the Coastal School Districts have cancelled classes for the rest of the week. They aren’t going to let anything slip past them this time, it seems. The grocery stores are all out of bottled water already. (I have a few empty containers here that I’m going to fill up.) They are also out of goodies like masking tape and batteries. As I said before, I’ve never been in Houston for a big hurricane – the extent of my planning originally was wondering if I had enough sock yarn to get me through the storm!

Of course, now I’m thinking about things that are much more important than that. I don’t know if we will evacuate; we’ll decide that in the next day or so. For now we need to stock up on supplies – especially after reading how our side of town had no electricity for two weeks back in 1983 after Hurricane Alicia. Hopefully, the systems have improved in the past 20 years, but just in case I want to be ready.

The Chronicle has a Rita blog set up already. The SciGuy is covering it also.

It is interesting for me to watch the school closings, since I’m a student now too. I wonder if my classes will be cancelled. We have our first Algebra test next Tuesday – what a birthday present! – and I wonder if it will be rescheduled if we don’t have class this Thursday. (I’ll study as if we are having it, since we have covered all but the very end of the material it is over.) We need to get through the storm first though – then we’ll worry about things like tests.

I had a physical therapy appointment yesterday, and while I was in the waiting room there was a soap opera on the TV. The older lady sitting across from me was watching the show as I read a magazine. The show was interrupted by a special report, and I stopped reading when I realized that they were announcing the voluntary evacuation plan for Galveston, which starts today. It seems that Hurricane Rita is heading our way.

The lady across from me looked at me with a look of true fear in her eyes as she asked me how far away we were from Galveston.

It was at that moment that I realized she must be one of the survivors of Katrina, waiting out the time before she can return home to New Orleans. Now another hurricane might be in her near future.

I told her that Galveston is about an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes south on I-45 from where we were at, and that normally when a hurricane comes the northwest side of town just gets a lot of wind and rain.

She looked so sad.

I’m glad in a way that I was called back to the therapy session at that moment, because it dawned on me that while I have lived in Houston for most of 20 years now, I have only been here for one or two weak hurricanes. Every coastal town has a “big storm” that they measure things by – we have the hurricane that all but wiped out Galveston in 1900 (the church Mike & I were married in was a storm survivor), and then, most recently, there was Alicia. In 1983. Two years before I moved to Houston. By the time we moved here, people were still talking about that storm; not just the hurricane, but the tornados and flooding that it caused.

The more I think about it, the more nervous I get. So far, most of the models show it hitting just below Galveston on the coast, putting us on the “dirty side” (with all the water) of the storm. I’ve said for a year now that we are way past due for a big storm, and I’m afraid that our turn has finally come. It is going to be a long week…

(Charles has some great storm coverage, in case you want more details. And kudos to Galveston for having a system in place to allow people to register for bus transportation to get off the island, and for getting the ball rolling so early.)