Last night was a soggy Halloween:

Death in streets took a back seat to dinner.

I guess I have become hypersensitive to reports of hurricanes in or near the Gulf of Mexico. Wilma seemed to go from tropical storm to category 5 hurricane in the blink of an eye. She is now the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever. There will be no cute “Dear Wilma” letter this time. I want no […]

…and I say, it’s all right…

Update, little darling:

According to an article in the Houston Chronicle this morning, 31 people died in Harris County as a result of hurricane Rita and

More than half of those deaths — 17 of the 31 recorded so far — were of people evacuating to safer ground when they suffered some sort of medical distress, said Beverly Begay, […]

Note the position of the plywood: it’s inside the windows! Good thing the storm never came to college station, because all those coloring books would have been soaked.

We finished with the plywood at about 9:30 PM. We spent another hour putting stuff into the house - stuff like the grill, the outdoor furniture, etc. Then we took a short break for sandwiches. Wendy and I are both exhausted, but we have much still to do. I have to make that home inventory […]

Last night we covered the eight windows on the first story front. This morning we got up with the sun and by 7:15 were working again. It took until about 11:30 to finish the front of the house. Doing the front is the bulk of the work; it accounts for 20 of our 37 windows […]

Rita has become a category 4 hurricane and you’d better believe she has our full attention. Although the computer models have not converged yet, all but one of them show Houston in a very bad place. The city of Houston is due to make the evacuation call at 9:30 AM. With Rita at category 4 […]

What a day. Rita strengthened from a tropical storm into a category 2 hurricane faster than you can say “Ulp!”. Projections are that it will become a catogery 4 storm before making landfall.
The predicted path has changed slightly since yesterday, now favoring Matagorda Bay more than Galveston. That’s not necessarily good news for the […]

Wendy has been calling hotels all over inland Texas, trying to find a hotel that (a) still has rooms for Thursday through the weekend, (b) takes pets, and (c) has a reasonable cancellation policy. Finally, she found something and we have reservations at a dog-friendly hotel in Temple, Texas. That’s Plan B. Plan A? Plan […]

What a thousand dollars worth of plywood and plylox looks like:

That’s thirty sheets of half-inch plywood and fourteen bags of plylox. It cost us just over a thousand dollars. Ouch.
I don’t mind laying out the money for a little protection. That’s just the Dummy Tax for living on the Texas gulf coast. What I really […]