Ike's Gone and We're Baaaack

Some hairy times Friday night and Saturday morning. The lights (and television and refrigerator and internet) were snuffed about 5:00 Saturday morning, and we awoke Saturday to high winds, torrential rains and several pounds of debris per square foot of our lot in Willis. In many ways it was a textbook hurricane.

Don't know if you've seen the commercial in which the guy doesn't have a high def tv so he ends up watching the live action out his window. That was me. We opened the blinds and turned the loveseat around so it faced out the window to the street in front of the house. With no other entertainment, I watched the wind blow the rain and the occasional branch horizontally down the street. That was pretty entertaining for 15 or 20 minutes of every hour for about six hours.

Our neighbors across the street had company and every 30 minutes the winds would buffet their car alarms into action. The lights would flash and the horns would beep for five minutes and then go dormant again. Why they felt the cars had to be locked in these kind of conditions was somewhat of a mystery, but, hey, eventually the winds calmed and their card never did get stolen or even broken into.

We heard things hitting the roof every once in a while and the first couple of times I donned my rain slicker and headed outside to see what it was. They were evidently glancing blows because I never saw any big chunks of anything on the roof but saw plenty of branches laying around the house. As I looked up to the roof I saw the 100 foot-plus pines in the neighborhood sweeping across the sky and thought, "Hmmm, one or more of them could fall over ... on ME." And back into the house I would scurry.

On about my third trip out, I looked to the south of our street and saw one of those pines that had been sweeping across the sky was now sweeping the street. It was a big 'un, 16 inches in diameter. It had uprooted from our next door neighbor's front yard. As we go around the neighborhood later, it had lots of company. Perhaps two thirds of the trees had uprooted and toppled over and one third had snapped off. Most of the downed timber didn't hit houses or vehicles. Maybe 20 percent did.

While we had built up a supply of ice and didn't have too, too much food in the fridge, in most other ways we were not nearly as prepared as we should have been. We didn't have any "D" batteries that would refresh the flashlights we had. We didn't have a battery powered radio, although after another tour of the house, Pammie found a small transistor M&M radio that took "AA" batteries so we were able to monitor a couple of stations that were still broadcasting.

Our household telephone line continued working for half a day after the power went out but, of course, our portable phones were out of commission. I had a hard-wire headset phone in my study and remembered that Pammie, who you may now realize has every M&M novelty item known to man, had an M&M phone. We plugged it in and it worked just fine.

Most of Houston has been without power since the wee hours of Saturday morning. My BMW dealership had power restored on Wednesday, and we got out power back at home at about 5 p.m. Wednesday. Not surprisingly it went out again an hour later, but after a few more hours, it came back on to stay (knock on wood) at about 9 a.m.

The last two nights were spent in driveway revelry with a few neighbors cleaning out their coolers and liquor cabinets. With the power back on we will retreat, at least for a few days, into our routines, but we all vowed to get out more and have a driveway feast every couple of weeks.

It's nice to be a survivor.