I Dislike Ike

Hey, for all my calculation work yesterday...25 more customers in our area don't have power. You know, just to make things more difficult - and actually still very much in line with my trendline since I had used the early morning estimate on the 23rd and that's the end of the day estimate of the 23rd - which is what I used for all the other days. Our day care had a generator set-up yesterday - I'm pretty sure they're renting it because I doubt the city will approve of where it is sitting. So Landon is back at his normal school. It seems that the internet cameras are not running, but that's ok.

In other good news, my parents have power as of yesterday.

And, because you can’t have a major catastrophe without learning a lesson or two.

Things we did well:

We had water. We had plenty of water. One case of bottled water, a couple gallon jugs. Honestly, I kind of knew that without electricity, we’d be leaving for somewhere better anyway, so we really just needed enough to last a day or so. If we’d had a generator and intended to stick it out for the whole non-electricity debacle, we’d also need a generator. Our windows on one side of the house don’t open, so creating a cross breeze by opening windows doesn’t work.

I filled the voids of our deep freeze with ice prior to the outage (we will probably purchase dry ice to put in there for the next storm.) That ice and not opening the freezer is probably the only reason we did not have to throw out any beef. On Wednesday when we were still without power I sent Linda over to shop in our freezer. When she opened it she found that everything was still frozen and we still had ice. We got power that evening, so we were good to go.

I drained the pool as low as I could, and the rain refilled it to just over full. It kept us from having all the earthworms in the pool that normally result from a hard rain overflow.

Things we will do differently next time:

Food. Our food choices were…peanut butter on saltines…and peanut butter on saltines. I cannot find my Coleman stove, although I am still looking for it, so we had no heating up ability aside from the BBQ pit. For all the ice I put in the deep freeze, I had none for a cooler, if I stocked the freezer of the outdoor fridge with ice as well, we’d have been able to salvage a lot of stuff by putting it in a cooler, including condiments. I should have planned a “camping trip” style menu, instead of wishing for the best and thinking I could pull some kind of magic out of my butt to create a meal out of our unstocked pantry. The main issue here is that we shop like Eminem's trailer park girls (round the outside), we don’t eat a lot of canned or processed food, so we had nothing really. We also don’t eat a lot of bread, so we didn’t even have sandwich type making stuff.

Evacuating. When we finally made the call to leave, we grabbed just enough clothes for what we thought would be one night and planned to return in the morning. Clint was better prepared because he had a bag packed when he thought he’d be riding out the storm at work. Things we were missing once we realized we were not going home the next morning: my deodorant, dog food, any kind of baby friendly washing supplies, enough underwear for me, enough diapers for Landon, and any food at all. We made it work, we were able to do a load of laundry once we got to my in-laws and we bought what we needed as we needed it, but it would have been nice if we’d had it to begin with.

All in all, I much prefer the way this disaster went over Rita any day. Massive lengthy power outage not withstanding.