We arrived home yesterday around 4pm after leaving Brownsboro around 9am. We had no electricity and it was pretty hot inside the house.
Everything was just as we had heard from a few people who stopped by earlier to check it out for us; the fence was down, there were branches and leaves all over the place, there were no broken windows, my storage building was still standing just the way we left it, and there were no signs of vandalism or theft.
We packed up some stuff to stay the night at the church, being as there was electricity there, and got some McDonalds food to satisfy our hunger pains. We went over to a great friend’s house to do some laundry and do a little swimming to cool off. We found out that we had electricity and went home after picking our stuff up from the church around 11:30pm.
It took a few hours for the house to cool off so we could get a few hours sleep before going to work this morning. It felt SO good to be cold this morning.
My parents still don’t have power (they’re close to Beaumont), but they only lost a few trees. They didn’t have one broken window, and only got about 5 inches of rain.
To my knowledge, everyone I know is doing just fine.
Author: kunefke
My Storage Building!
I heard this evening that someone from our church went by the house to check on our stuff. The fence between us and the neighbor fell into her yard, but it didn’t look like anything else was damaged. Not even my building! That made my day much better.
My parents don’t know yet whether there was any damage to their house or their other house that they’re selling in Port Arthur. Their house is about 50 miles east of ours, so it’s possible that they might have had some damage.
I hope there’s not the same kind of traffic going home that there was leaving…
Update/Cell Phone Service
I text paged my Dad earlier asking him if they’d made it to Tyler yet, and he responded that they were there, comfortable, and headed to bed.
For anyone who doesn’t know… If your cell phone isn’t working, your text messaging should work just perfectly. I haven’t been able to talk to my family in over 28 hours, but we have been completely successful with the text pages.
I hope this helps.
18 Hours On The Road
We got up at 2:30am yesterday morning to leave at 3, but didn’t end up leaving until around 3:30am. We started heading up 225 and I was thinking, “This is GREAT! We’ll be in Athens in, at most, 6 hours.” As soon as Beltway 8 was in sight, I saw nothing but lights… standing almost perfectly still. At 9:30am, we were still only 39.5 miles from where we started.
We worked our way around and through traffic for about 15 to 20 minutes, and around 1:00pmwe decided to get off of 59, and try to take some back roads. We started off with full tanks of gas,and at this time, I was down to half of that.
I was so excited to actually drive for the next 20 miles over 50 mph! My A/C was running and blowing the cold air in my face. I saw some signs that were showing the temperature at 112 degrees! We got to highway 75 and started going north. It was all good for about 2 miles, and then we were stuck in traffic again.
Every gas station we passed either had bags over the spouts, or lines that were 2 hour waits, and nothing but Supreme. The prices were still only like $2.89/gallon for Supreme, though. We got on 19, and headed east, and then north. I got down to the empty line, and called my father-in-law to let him know. Denny said if we ran out of gas, that he’d head down with a few gas containers for us, but we found a gas station that was pumping away, and only had a 20 minute wait shortly after my phone call. We only had to drive about 8 miles to find it.
We filled up with gas, still around the same price, and headed north. We had more traffic almost half the time, and got to Athens around 10:10pm. About 20 minutes later, we had reached our destination in Brownsboro. Waking up this morning, I realize that this is some of the most beautiful land in Texas. Rolling hills, big beautiful trees, and much cleaner air than Houston.
My parents left their house yesterday afternoon in Hamshire, and got to Livingston at 3:30am this morning. They left there to head for Tyler this morning after getting a little sleep.
I hope everyone’s doing ok, and staying safe.
GOOD NEWS! Rita’s down to a CAT3!
Leaving Home (RITA)
We’re leaving in the morning (3am) to head up to Athens, TX. We’ll be staying through Rita and hopefully be home on Sunday night. I pray that everything here stays in tact, and we don’t have any major damage. I just finished building a storage shed in the backyard, and I’d hate for all that time spent to go to waste.
I’m bringing my computer, some food and water, and my MP3 player loaded with 3 days worth of Glenn Beck broadcasts. I’m also bringing the video camera in case it’s needed as well.
I hope everyone else out there is taking the proper precautions, because hunkering down during a CAT5 hurricane is pretty nuts when you’re this close to it’s projected path.
Supplies for Rita
Christle and I went to go for our normal shopping trip, and I figured I’d get some extra water, and a few things to cover us just in case we didn’t have power for a few days. We got to Wal-Mart around 5:30pm and they were running out of drinking water. I had a pretty good idea that people would be a little more cautious about getting supplies with everything that happened with Katrina, but I had no idea people would actually be fighting over the last of the drinking water!
I promise you, I am not overdramatizing this story.
I left Christle there to get the rest of the groceries while I ran down to Kroger to get drinking water there. At the Kroger store, everything was completely different. They were short on water, but I was the only one in the aisle getting all the water I could fit in/on my basket. There were no price hikes or anything; I actually bought the water I got on sale. The clerk acted like she didn’t know why everyone was getting so much water this morning. I didn’t feel the need to tell her, because she looked like she’d forget in a half hour anyway.
When I got back to Wal-Mart, I heard people on their cell phones, “You’ll never guess what they’ve run out of…”, and “I can’t believe a store that gets this much business would run out of WATER…” Stupid people don’t realize the way supply and demand work. There has to be a drastic demand before the supply will increase! I’m sure that tomorrow morning, every grocery store in our region of the Gulf Coast will have triple the amount of water delivered that they had delivered this morning.
I guess Katrina really scared people.
The only thing I have left to buy is a few extra boxes of ammo…
Rita
Apparently there is a tropical storm brewing near the Keys, that is heading in our direction. Rita hasn’t been called a hurricane yet, but should be soon after passing the keys and gathering strength in the Gulf. The path she’s taking looks almost exactly like that of the hurricane that went through Galveston about 100 years ago. They compared Katrina to that hurricane. I’ve got to get ready as far as supplies go today. Tomorrow, people will start frantically taking the stock of the grocery stores in the area, and I want to be ready just in case.
– Water – check
– Food – check
– Ammo – check
Rebuilding New Orleans
It looks like the Bush Administration is going to take the advice of many conservatives and rebuild with a new blueprint. A city blueprint that involves ownership and accountability. They can get things built correctly with the future in mind. They can quite possibly take New Orleans from one of the poorest cities in America to one of the most productive if they plan everything correctly.
I’ve seen many Democrats stating loudly that we need to rebuild New Orleans just the way it was, politics and all. The problem is, the Democratic Party has had a stronghold on the state of Louisiana for over 60 years, and we can all see where that has gotten them. I believe they are still there for the most part, because the fact of how they got where they are still hasn’t come to fruition to most of them. It is now known by almost the entire world that the people in Louisiana were among the poorest in America, and most dependent on the government. If they hadn’t been told all their lives that the government would always take care of them as long as they kept voting for the Democratic ticket, they might have had the driving power to get off their rearends and make something of themselves instead of just letting the government take care of them through Welfare.
We also need to stop sending so many people from outside New Orleans to do the building. Let the people who’ve been displaced come back and take pride in their rebuilding efforts. Maybe then they will have a better sense of ownership when the city is back up and running, so that New Orleans will stay clean and attractive for decades beyond their lifetimes.
Astroworld Closing
Astroworld is closing it’s doors after being a part of Houston for 37 years. Apparently they had some debt to take care of and they were having problems with securing their parking lot during football games & the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. To rid themselves of the debt, Six Flags decided that they had to let go of Astroworld.
Astroworld seems to have been run down over the past few years. It was going downhill while the prices were going uphill. Maybe someone else will be able to maintain a family entertainment facility a little better.
It just really stinks because I was really looking forward to bringing my daughter there next year. Maybe we’ll have to stick with Schlitterbahn Galveston.
Google Moon
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Google Earth, but they’ve come up with a Google Moon. The creative people at Google have added some images to the map of the moon using some pretty liberal creativity. For those that are interested in seeing some detailed views of the moon’s surface, zoom in as far as possible on almost any part of the surface.
Another pretty cool part of the thing is that it shows where Apollo missions 11-17 landed (minus 13, of course). I didn’t know that they landed so close to one another.
I just checked to see if there was a Google Mars, but apparently they haven’t gotten there yet, or maybe they just haven’t had the time. They recently decided to offer a second public offering of stock options. They were recommended to offer around 15 million shares, and they decided to offer exactly 14,159,265 shares to raise approximately $4.2 billion for more projects. You may realize that the number is pretty strange, but familiar. That’s because it is a derivative of PI.
These people are talented and also have a pretty good sense of humor. I don’t know any tech out there that wouldn’t want to be working for Google right now.