The waiting is the hardest part

After weathering Hurricane Ike with very few problems to speak of and heaving a giant collective sigh of relief, we spent one long hot day at the compound and then power came back on Saturday night at 10:00pm. We did a little celebratory rocking and went to bed in the a/c, naively thinking everyone else was doing the same and life in Houston would be getting back to normal on Sunday.


Now it's Tuesday morning. Or, I guess technically afternoon? Sometime yesterday the reality of our situation here started to dawn on me. Maybe it was the steady stream of sweaty exhausted friends stopping by on foot, bikes, or the rare vehicle to bask in the air conditioning and beg for a space on an extra bed or couch. Maybe it was the walk to the Little Buddy complete with people screaming questions out of cars slowly cruising by ("They got ice? Gas? Cold soda? My baby needs something cold!"). Maybe it was getting a text message from the CDC saying to drink bottled water. Maybe it was seeing us as a tiny green dot in a sea of orange on the power outage map, or hearing that HISD is closed the rest of the week and possibly into the next, or hearing that Kroger is rationing food so we need to go to the store in groups and split up to buy more. Maybe it was finally sobering up when we ran out of Malibu. Maybe it was all that and an impossible to find bag of tortilla chips, but it's hitting me.


Reality is that power is still out all over town. Some of our friends don't even have running water. We've got about 6 people staying here and many more stopping in to shower, charge cell phones, or use the internet via the highly resourceful hippies out back. We have no cable or phone (so no DSL) but we do have power, and now are aware how incredibly lucky we are. Some streets are still flooded, gas is hard to find and expensive, store shelves are getting empty, and trees are down all over the place. We all hunkered down and then prepared for a couple of days of inconvenience. Most of us had no clue we could potentially be facing days turning into weeks of living in bizarro world.



Don't get me wrong, we're making the best of it around here. This place is affectionately known as the compound, and it's definitely living up to its name right now. Everyone who stops in brings something along to share, or is here to help clean up and restore order in and around the party shack out back. By noon on Sunday, The Amazing Goodlings had already shown up looking freaking adorable in their matching gloves and rubber boots (who else can rock post-hurricane cleanup gear?) , chain saw and rake in hand. The treetops blocking the door to Club DubDub and covering the roof are already nothing but a good story. Allen and Jennifer are superheroes, and so are Kirk & April, Tim, Dana, and Jordan. I'm truly amazed that stuff is cleaned up already! The mood around here is sort of a cross between a slumber party and summer camp. We're all on a kind of forced vacation, oddly suspended in time and space. It's certainly not unfamiliar to be here in our house at all hours of the day or night with 10 of our closest friends, but the circumstances this time are a little different. And we're going on 3 days... but so far, so good. We have DVDs, books, and lots of music and so far, plenty of food and water. And air conditioning!



Jordan is Mad Maxing it with a posse of kids over at his girlfriend Neyana's house. They have power there too, and provisions like beef jerky, cases of Hungry Man Beef Soup and Chef Boyardee Ravioli. There is nothing about him being over there that I understand, but Tim assures me that I've done the right thing in not insisting he come home immediately and stay here because I said so. Thank goodness I have my friends here to make lunches, drinks and beds for (and rock with, of course!) or I might have lost it after all. Seriously.


A few pics. Early Saturday morning view out the window.... where are the rest of those trees?

We found them! This is looking from the beaded fig tree down the sidewalk at the doors of the lounge.

Here are a few shots of the cleanup in action -- you can see Allen and Jen kicking it their boots:

This is looking down the street at the limbs starting to pile up:

And here's us hanging out yesterday with our next door neighbor Robin (not the guys with the pool, the other side). We're in the top of a tree that used to tower above our houses. It took out his deck and is still on top of part of his house in addition to filling the back yard and covering the driveway between his house and his parent's house next door to him on the other side.

I've added more pics to this album and even got started on the captions:


http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=jcreil7.2q36ya57&x=0&h=1&y=r8fiog&localeid=en_US