We Survived Ike

We came back home on Saturday after evacuating for Hurricane Ike. Tommy, Jakeb and the dogs (yes, they were fine) came home in the morning and the girls and I followed and returned home around 7:15pm. We have no electricity but our house is in great shape! Our neighborhood had minimal damage - mostly just a lot of limbs and leaves to clean up. The wind and rain hit so hard it plastered the leaves to the back of our house. There will probably be leave prints embedded when they dry out and fall off.

A few of our neighbors are home and the streets are fairly busy but many people have not returned yet. I’ll bet their refrigerators are going to be gross when they return. There are several houses around with trees in them – they certainly don’t belong there! I hate that for them but we count our blessings that we are safe and sound and our clean up is pretty much finished. I heard someone drive by last night laughing because ours is neatly manicured with a HUGE pile of brush lining the street. It stood out because our neighbors were all still a mess. We can help our neighbors and family now. The city is doing a fabulous job clearing streets and patrolling. I’m typically not too impressed with our po-dunk town but they are doing a great job with this. Yesterday we got ice from a fema set up in Freeport and today they set one up in Lake Jackson. I was only planning on getting the ice because we really didn’t need anything else but they were chunking these snack bags at me through my window and barking (nicely) at me to unlock my door. I couldn’t argue so I ended up with two bags of ice, a case of bottled water and 6 bags of goodies. The bags have peanuts, gushers, fruit cereal bars, peanut butter crackers and a yummy can of Vienna sausages. The pack also had a pack of plastic utensils and a sanitary hand wipe. We won’t be eating the Vienna sausages…..

There are several random pockets of electricity around town. There are a couple of whole subdivisions with power. Krogers opened yesterday evening for about 2 hours! HEB was open and stocking this afternoon. There are a few gas stations open. It will just be a matter of keeping things stocked. Jenny & Phillip are staying with his parents and they have electricity so we can go hang out over there if we need to. I think we may go do a load of laundry tonight over there. They say that the power may not be up for 3-4 weeks in some places due to the damaged power lines. We may be one of those places since we have power lines down just a few houses from us but our optimistic next door neighbor says he thinks it will be up in 48 hours. We are basically camping in our house. We can handle it, I think, due to the amazing generosity of one of our neighbors who has some kind of hyper-powered generator that is powering his whole house, minus the a/c. and enough power left to run our fridge and fans and the neighbors fridge and fans in between us. Thanks, Mr. Pratt!!! I have absolutely no idea how we will thank him for this. Not sure a batch of cookies would do on this one. We did bake some choc. chip cookies on the grill yesterday! I had some homemade dough in the freezer that thawed so we decided to try it out. They were very good! Who knew….. I wonder how grilled vienna sausages would be?

The weather is really nice right now with the cool front that came through last night so we’ll be in really good shape for a few days. Our water supply is safe so we can drink and shower and wash dishes. We have a gas stove and a grill so we can eat. I think we can manage for a while but hopefully it won’t be a while. The mosquitoes are insane!!! I can’t imagine what the mosquitoes are like in the areas that flooded.

My next post will be a photo journal but we’re bumming internet I thought it best to just post info first and make it quick cause I don't know how long their power will be on. Our cell reception is almost non-existent right now so this will also serve as a note to our family and friends that we are fine. We hope and pray you are doing okay as well. We hear that Surfside, Beaumont, Orange and Galveston weren't as fortunate as we were. Thanks to everyone for your prayers. Keep ‘em comin’. Not so much for us but there are many with a lot of damage and a lot of work to do.