Pintmaster

It’s less than 24 hours until Rita makes landfall. I am typing this from our saferoom, the 2nd floor bathroom on the east side of the house - with no windows and not too much space. We have a large supply of canned and fresh food and water, a flashlight, candles, my cell phone, a walkie talkie to communicate with Nick, Kevin and Kim who are also riding out the storm and kennels for the pets. When tomorrow morning arrives, I am sure we will be awakened earlier by the howling winds, but right now I am planning to come into the safe room at 6:00 am, right around the same time the hurricane will make landfall.

Veronique and I planned to leave Houston, and even had the car packed. It took my colleague Erik from 4:00 am Thursday morning until 7:00 pm Thursday to get to Austin, and miraculously he made it on one tank of gas. The trip usually takes 2 1/2 - 3 hrs. When we saw the state of the roads on Thursday morning, we still decided to try and leave. We drove north to I-10, saw it wasnt moving at all and then decided to come back into the city. I got a big bottle of water from the office, took the backups out of the server and we went to Kroger. Thank you so much for being open on Thursday. Most of the other supermarkets were either closed or out of food, but the Kroger on W. Gray was open, the lines were long, but the fresh food was plenty, and there were enough cans of food too that you werent going to go hungry. So, we got our $200 worth of emergency food and made our way back to the house.

As of right now, there isnt much we can do except prepare a little, put breakables away if we can. I think we will take the dog for a walk in a little while, maybe see what is on T.V. tonight. Hopefully they dont cancel regular programs for hurricane coverage! Wish us the best of luck. I will try and post a message when the power goes out. Providing the internet stays up when the power goes down, I have a battery backup on the cable modem and the wireless router so I should be able to post from the safe room. Watch this space!

Oh yeah, we are using channel 7, security code 31 during the storm… if anyone has a radio and is within 10 miles, give us a shout.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2005 at 1:10 pm and is filed under General, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.