Hurricane Update

We weathered Ike without incident. We were mainly just bored, because we had no power or running water, and P doesn't enjoy playing cards while powerless, as I do. :) Even the cat was just bored, instead of freaking out. He had this perpetual expression that clearly read, "Mama, can we turn the TV on now, please? I'm bored and my mice aren't exciting anymore." He likes to watch TV.

Saturday night we went to bed. It was raining (apparently there was a non-Ike related storm), and the rain was hard enough to wake us periodically. In the morning, P woke up to the sound of Aleister splashing around our room, and a rushing noise. I woke up to the rushing noise. We got up and were pretty groggy, mainly confused about why there was six inches of dirty water in the floor. Aleister should've been unhappy about the water, seeing as he's a cat, but it seemed fun to him somehow. Then we realised the water was rising, and we were not groggy anymore. We splashed through the house to assess the damage. There was a lot of water. Like this:


This was the begining. We didn't really understand, since the hurricane was over. So we peeked out the front window. And we saw this:


Neat. It was still raining. We took pictures of all our stuff to submit to insurance (which, oh-so-happily has declined to cover flood damage. They will only cover damages caused by the loss of power). We packed the backpacker's backpack with clothes. We put a small ziplock bag of food for the cat. We got the emergency packpack (with food cubes) out of the car. And two camping chairs, for a sense of "luxury." Then we got a little water of the house, and we left. We saw across the main cross street there was some high ground. So we trekked through thigh deep water, P carrying the big backpack and the chairs, and me carrying the cat in his carrier and the emergency pack. I had to lift the cat up to my head to keep him dry. That was kind of funny. He had been crying when he went into the carrier, but when I lifted and carried him through the current, he seemed to realise this was not a good time to be causing more problems and he settled down. The current was fairly strong, so we walked using a modified kayak ferry technique (basically we moved with the current and across it at the same time) to get across safely. We didn't want to fall, particularly strapped to heavy items, with a cat who wouldn't be able to swim out of the carrier if he was lost. We got across fine and set up our chairs, watching across to where our street was. Eventually it stopped raining.

Here's a picture of some people I saw moving their children in shopping carts. You can see the children's feet are in the water:


Here's another picture of the flooding, at its finest:


Finally the water receeded enough for us to go back, get water out of the house, collect some more things and to leave the city. Aleister, lovely cat that he is, knocked our laptops in the water, so we don't have computers anymore. Both desktops and both laptops are gone. We're still working out replacing them, since effectively, our entire lives were on those computers - homework, address books, finances.. everything. All the other property losses are insignificant to me, though I'd have appreciated it in my harp hadn't gotten flooded, as I'd been trying to sell it.

I took some more pictures of the neighbourhood, and the damage to it. So this is what's left of my neighbourhood.









So... Yeah. We're in Dallas right now, staying with a friend. Wednesday we have to go back, and we will be staying somewhere outside Katy, because neither of us is willing to drop our classes this semester. It's going to be hellish until we have a place to live, but we'll get through it.

On an upside, we have really had the opportunity to discover how strong some of our friendships are, and how wonderful of a support network we have. Family, friends, people we barely know, and even our landlord have rallied for us, trying to provide as much comfort, living accommodations and help as possible. For which we are unspeakably grateful.