Stresstember

• Landon started day care.
• Ike came.
• Loss of power for 5 days.
• Impromptu road trip around Texas.
• Fence down, requires dealing with an ornery neighbor.
• Fence propped up, but not necessarily stable.
• People are told to return to work.
• They moved my computer, but not my phone.
• Day care has no power.
• No one has supplies for fence building.
• Day care still has no power.
• Work related stuff has a deadline which cannot be met after a week off.
• Fence guy thinks he can become billionaire on my dime.
• Fence down completely.
• Fence still down completely.
• Landon is sent home from school with a fever, not to return until 24 hours post non-medicated non-fever.
• Fencing supplies everywhere you look.
• Get notice that Landon's main teacher is leaving the school.
• Attend work related meeting/interview where I am officially responsible for bringing a massive project ending (if it weren't already being built) sized problem to light and they'd like to know what the hell happened to get us to that point.
• Birthday party coming up on Saturday - have bought 4 plastic tablecloths and candles in preparation and nothing else.
• Work related stuff gets put off to late next week.
• Fence still down completely.
• Discover neighbors are trying to take over ornery neighbor's yard 6 inches at a time.
• Work related stuff gets pushed up to early next week.
• Fence supplies dwindling.
• Landon comes home from Day Care covered in bright orange paint, and I have no orange painting to show for it - nor do they fill out the section of his sheet that is supposed to tell me what he did all day.
• Friend building fence gets called back to work.
• Again with the not telling me what he did all day on his sheet.
• Brother in law coming to help finish fence.
• Work experiences loss of water...I cannot even flush a damn toilet here.

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.

The Definition of Insanity Revised

I just plotted the trend line of power restoration to time in our zip code to see if there's any possibility that our day care will get their power back today. My calculations predict that yes, they will. (Technically what I plotted was the outtages remaining to time...the goal being - for the outtages to reach 0.)



Actually the first one I did I used more data points, this one only has the last given data point for each day. I tried all kinds of trend lines and the linear one actually worked the best.

I am a nerd.

That is all.

Let there be light

So. We got our power back on Wednesday and came home Thursday morning. I was supposed to report to work Thursday morning at 10 am, which I didn't get the message about until about 1:30 pm. Never the less, I wasn't expected to be there because I had child care issues. I actually still have child care issues, they do not have power, so I have a 2 year old in my office. This is not going to last very long, but I had to come in and get some files so I could conceivably work from home, you know, if they had moved phones AND computers to our new offices instead of just computers...

Anyway, hopefully the day care will get power today, that's what the map says should happen. And tomorrow I can return to work as normal.

We're ok

We rode out the storm, lost power about midnight or so, then wait around until about 8 pm Saturday to decide that no, we cannot sleep in an non breezey non A/C'd house. We went to my parents Lake house, we are now at my in-laws house, from our sources back home we apparently have no power still, although the rest of the nieghborhood has power.

Anyway, work's been canceled, schools are canceled, we're not going back until we have power, and when we do, we may very well have to throw out 200 lbs of beef. If power doesn't come back on today, I have little hope for our freezer. Or we'll pull it all out in the front of the house and start cooking for all the neighbors.

Anyway, this isn't a very put together post, but I thought you might be interested in our well being.

Ike Ike Bo Bike, Banana Fana Fo Fike

Unless you're living under a rock, you know that Ike is aiming it's big fat fist at Houston. Actually it's the eye, but that sounds dumb, I'm menacingly aiming my eye at you!

So yesterday Clinton and I put everything in our backyard in the garage. Well, most everything. We're not in a flood plane, we're not in a mandatory evacuation area, we are going to probably see winds between 80-110mph. Which houses in our area are built for. We have a case of water, and when/if the water runs out and if we don't have electricity at that point, I will pack up the car and head out. To where? I don't know. But hopefully it won't come to that anyway.

It will be 10 am before most places in our area are going to make the call about whether they are closing on Friday or not, schools included, as of now, they have not canceled classes.

When we evacuated for Rita, we learned many many lessons. One of which was...don't go if you don't have to. A 24 hour car ride with 2 dogs was excruiating, I can't imagine adding a baby to the mix. And the possibility of one less adult as well (since Clint may be staying at work.) Rest assured, I will not be so bold as to stay when/if I think the conditions warrant leaving, and at the very outmost possibility, we have an upstairs window to rooftop, so I can climb out with Landon and the dogs and assuming the cats are even findable, and sit on the roof and wait for the helicopter. If I black out some of my teeth and wear a nightgown I might even get interviewed by the news!