Hurricane Ike

Nothing like a mandatory evacuation to stop regularly scheduled blogging. My parents, Zac, I, and two cats evacuated on Thursday, September 11th, to San Antonio, TX. What should have been a three-hour drive on I-10 took about seven hours. I learned an interesting lesson during that time: it's not actually using the computer that hurts my shoulder and back, it's sitting hunched over for a couple of hours at a time.

We were lucky to find one of the last hotel rooms in San Antonio. Unfortunately, the hotel didn't allow any animals, regardless of the circumstances. Even begging didn't help. There was a firm "no pet" policy that a harried night manager was not going to bend for a car load of hurricane evacuees with very old cats. The cats stayed in a kennel for four days, which probably had more room than three adults and a toddler had in a hotel room with two full-size beds. It's not that I don't love my family. I do. I just love them more when I we have doors that can be shut between us.

Zac has weathered the evacuation remarkably well. He got to sleep next to his Mom for four nights. I can honestly say that I've haven't cuddled that much, for consecutive nights, in over five years. It wasn't enough to sleep near me, or even have parts of his body on me. No, he wanted to meld our bodies together. He had his arm wrapped around my neck and his feet on the small of my back. At one point, he ended up perpendicular to me and kicked me in the chin repeatedly, waking me up as close to cursing as I could get while sleeping next to my parents and supposedly asleep first born.

Not that I can complain much. The drive back took only about four hours. Our house avoided significant damage. My Dad has been helping the neighbors rebuild their fences and find tarps to cover the patches of their roofs. We lost all of the food in our refrigerator and freezer. The power is still off, although we have running water. The lack of power has been giving me a certain amount of flashbacks to Mongolia, but I'm making it through. I'm supposed to be back at work on Wednesday, provided work has power.

Until then, I'll be huddled around a portable 2" tv player, waiting to hear news about when power might be restored and trying, for the eighth time, to explain the concept of electricity to a three year-old that just wants to watch Dora and doesn't understand why the adults are holding out on him.