Friday
We alternated between obsessively watching the news/weather and standing outside commenting on whether the winds had picked up any. I spent the time between cleaning, washing clothes, cooking. We knew we’d lose power but we didn’t know when and we didn’t know for how long. By 8:30 that night the lights began to flicker. The dishwasher was an hour away from being through its cycle and the last load of laundry was in the dryer. I prayed for power until midnight, just to be safe. At exactly 11:33, the lights went out and stayed out.
By this point, the winds had really picked up and we could hear it howling around the corners of the house. The tall, skinny pine trees in the backyard thrashed back and forth and we watched in wonder because they didn’t break. The rain really hadn’t gotten to us yet, so it was just gusts of wind that we were dealing with.
I have an aversion to trying to find sleep when it is hot in the house, so once we lost power my instincts took over and I went to bed.
I didn’t say they were good instincts.
The stress of the day had caught up to me, and I fell asleep almost immediately.
Saturday
I awoke around 3am. The wind had progressed from howling to screaming and the rains had found us. The water hitting the window sounded like so many pebbles being hurled. The Hubby had not yet come to bed (apparently his instincts are smarter than mine) and I assumed that he was watching the storm. Sleep came again.
Around 5am, I awoke a second time to absolute silence. The Hubby had joined me at some point, and he woke up when I woke up. I asked if the storm had finally passed and he laughed quietly and said that this was just the eye. We had been in the eye for a little over an hour, and probably would be there for at least another hour.
The EYE? Over us?! But we’re at least an hour north of Galveston!
I did the only thing that made sense to me at the time and went back to sleep.
At 8am, I woke up for the day because I was floating in my own sweat. The winds were still very gusty and the rain was still pretty heavy. We couldn’t open windows for ventillation because the winds would blow the rain in and soak the floors. It was hot and humid – the two things I had been dreading with the coming of Ike. Although we had no power, the stove runs on propane, so we were able to boil some coffee. No one was in the mood for a hot breakfast, so we either did without or found something cold. We gathered around the back windows and watched the world come apart around us. By lunch, the majority of the rain had moved north along with the worst of the wind.
We were lucky. We lost power, but not water, not phones, not gas. We still owned a corded phone, we just had to find it. Venturing outside, the lawns were absolutely covered with debris from the trees. I commented that it looked like a crazed gardner had gone mad with the hedge clippers. Entire limbs were not just laying on the lawn, but were impaled in the grass and dirt like someone had tried to plant it from the leafy end. Walking around the house to survey the damage revealed nothing wrong with the house. Not even a lost shingle. The driveway had another story to tell, though. A tree from our neighbor’s yard had broken and fallen on the cars in our driveway. About 1.5 feet across at the base and over 20 feet tall, this was no small tree. It had broken, snapped like a dry twig, about 10 feet up from the ground, then crashed onto the roof of the Hubby’s car. Some of the larger branches landed on the top edge of my trunk lid, denting it up a bit. But then the winds had picked up again, lifting the tree and rolling it backwards off both of our cars and onto my mother’s, which was parked behind the Hubby’s. Her hood was crushed, the luggage rack shattered, and the rear window imploded on impact. Every part of her SUV had a dent in it, except for the front doors. The insurance adjustor who looked at it a few days later declared it a total loss.
We were lucky. The people across the street had a tree lean over and come to rest on their roof. Thankfully it didn’t fall into their house. It just slowly leaned that direction. Around the corner from us, there’s a family that no longer has a garage. There is an uprooted tree in its place. And across the street from them, that family has daylight in their living room from the gaping hole in the roof. And further down the street, the entire corner of the house is gone, and in the cul-de-sac further down, that family’s house is missing an entire exterior side.
We were lucky. We had a friend that shared his generator with us until we could get our own. It kept the refrigerator and deep freezer just cold enough to keep our food from spoiling. The people across the street lost everything in their refrigerator. They had no generator and none of the neighbors with one knew that they needed help. The businesses in the area lost whole roofs. The Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Baytown – just south of us – looks like someone set a bomb off in the rear of the building. The front looks completely whole. People 10 minutes south of us had 8 to 10 feet of water in their homes. Comparatively, we got a little sprinkle. Yet, as lucky as we were, Crosby looks like it’s gone through a war. Devastated is one word that could be used to describe this community, but it pales in the light of reality. So many lost so much that they could not afford to lose. But we were lucky. We are alive. Our homes and businesses still stand, albeit some of them are a little shaky.
Within a few hours of the storm finally passing, our next-door-neighbor, the owner of the tree on Mom’s car, came out with his chainsaws and began de-treeing the SUV. We don’t own a chainsaw, so we weren’t sure what to do about it. It was half a tree, after all, and all of us together couldn’t get it to move. The guy next door, Dad, the Hubby, and one of the guys across the street all pitched in to get Mom’s car uncovered. All told, it took about 2 hours. Not bad, considering you couldn’t tell there was an SUV under there before they got started. Once that was finished, they moved across the street and got the tree off that guy’s house. By the time they were done, it was past dark. And when I say dark, I mean hold your hand in front of your face and not be able to tell that you’re about to hit your own nose dark.
While most of the men were cutting down the tree across the street, the hubby and I weaved our way out of the neighborhood to our friend’s house to pick up his generator. We were going to share it so that we had it 8 hours and he had it 8 hours. The problem was getting from one home to the other with the street choked by tree debris and some of them crossed by downed power lines. We took a pretty detailed map with us to help navigate around the downed lines, and just hoped for the best. A 20 minute trip took over an hour, but we got there, grabbed the gennie and weaved back home. What a godsend! We opened up every window we could reach, propped up every fan we could and slowly, one by one, we drifted off to sleep serenaded by the hum of a street full of generators.
Sunday
The day the storm hit, Mom and I had sent the guys out to try to find some of the things we had discovered we were out of. One of the things on the list had been a battery-powered AM/FM radio or, at the very least, a NOAA radio. All they could find was an AM/FM radio headset. By Sunday, I had started becoming obsessed with listening to the news and weather on the headset. We spent the majority of the day outside, cleaning up the rest of the yard and helping out our neighbors with their own clean-up. We don’t have a huge yard, so the job was done fairly quickly for us, at least in the front. We had taken our friend’s gennie back in the early hours of the morning, so the house was stifling again. It had rained that night, supposedly to bring us an early cold front, but we weren’t feeling the temps drop yet. If the outside was in the mid- to upper-80’s, the inside of the house was at least 5 degrees warmer. There was no point in staying inside, so if I wasn’t raking leaves and branches, I was sitting in a lawn chair cooling off. Mid-afternoon, we picked up the gennie again for our time with it, and Mom and I retreated to the indoors to escape the mosquitos and to lay on a fan for a while.
The day passed quickly, and soon it was time to sleep again. Unfortunately, the gennie had to go back to our friends, so the house was very hot. I tried laying down in bed with no luck. I just tossed and sweat. I tried laying on the couch with slightly more luck, because I would sleep in 10 minute snatches. Finally, out of desperation, I took a cold shower and, without drying off, lay down on the bed with towels underneath me (no sense in ruining the mattress). With wet skin, I was able to stay cool enough to fall asleep for a couple of hours. Then, I would wake up drenched in sweat and with a driving headache, and take another cold shower to repeat the process. It was a relief when morning came. The strain of trying to sleep was driving me mad. At least with the sun up, I didn’t have to try anymore. But, I was in a daze. Little to no sleep for two days in the heat makes Jen a loopy girl.
Thankfully, the gennie was at our house for the day, so I parked a chair in front of a fan that had been put in the window, and stayed as still as possible. The guys were off trying to find gasoline. There were a couple of gas stations open, but the lines were hours long. The generator needed fuel, though, so there they sat. At least they were in a car with air conditioning. For my part, I tried to move as little as possible. It wasn’t hard to stay still since every movement was painful. My joints were aching with exhaustion, my headache wouldn’t go away, and neither would the heartburn. The Kiddo was suffering as well, and spent the day snoozing on the couch. We were too hot and exhausted to do anything else. Around 10pm that night, the gennie had to go back. When the fans went off, I nearly cried.
I think that was our breaking point. We had to do something. The fans weren’t cooling the air, but they were moving it. And when you’re already sweaty, sometimes all you need is moving air. The food in our refrigerator was starting to worry me, as well. The generator was getting it all cold again, and it was re-freezing the stuff in the freezer compartment, but that was the problem. It was getting the food cold or frozen again. When we didn’t have the generator, the temperatures in the fridge were reaching dangerously high levels. We had a quick family discussion and decided that we would split into teams the next morning. Mom and I in one, and the Hubby and Dad in the other. We would hit two different Lowe’s stores and try to buy our own generator. Mom and Dad would buy it, since it was their house and they would want to eventually tie it into the main house breaker box so that extension cords wouldn’t be needed. Everyone went to bed and tried to sleep.
I sat in the recliner in the living room and listened to the radio headset. My body ached with the need for sleep. I felt nauseated and light-headed all at once. Yet, still, I couldn’t sleep. I tried the cold shower technique. No dice.
Monday
At 3:45am, the Hubby woke up. He had slept the previous afternoon during the hottest part of the day (and while we still had fans), so he was pretty much slept out. He fixed coffee while I found breakfast. By the time we were done, Mom and Dad were up. The plan was to leave the house by 5am, get to Lowe’s by 5:30 for me and Mom, and 6 for Dad and the Hubby. We would stand in line as long as necessary to try to get a generator. Whoever got one would text message the other group (voice calls were not going through). Mom and I got lucky. Our store opened at 7am and they had received two truckloads of generators the previous evening. They had, literally, hundreds of generators available, and we were 22nd in line. The Hubby and Dad had a little less luck, since their store didn’t open until 8am, and the store only had about 15 generators available. They were 12th in line.
When our store opened, the manager announced that they had a lot of generators, extension cords, water, and batteries. There was a limit of 2 generators and 2 cases of water per customer, and they would take any form of payment except barter. They were letting people in 20 at a time. As customers left, the store employees would let another in. It didn’t take us long to get into the store, pick up what we needed, and get in line to check out. The employees were pre-loading the generators onto carts and had stacks of oil, extension cords, batteries, and cases of water close at hand to add to the carts, if the customers wanted more than just a generator. Mom and I grabbed a cart, checked out, and by 7:30am, we were on our way back to the house.
The guys took a little longer, since they had to pick up an extra couple of gas cans, then find some place to fill them. By lunch, though, they had the generator set up and the precious fans were blowing once again.
Never in my life have I so appreciated the power of moving air.
That day, I spent some time in the backyard helping to clean it up, took a nap, ate dinner, then went back to bed.
During that evening, the cooler temps finally settled down into our area, and the inside temperature of the house dropped to a chilly 63 degrees. It was heavenly! I actually had to throw the sheet over my legs! Seriously, it was the best thing that could have happened. None of us were sleeping well, and it would have been too easy to get sick. With all of the local clinics and stores closed, it would have been hell to have gotten sick.
Tuesday
It was so cold in my room that morning that I actually pulled out a throw blanket to cuddle under. I didn’t want the full summer quilt that’s normally on my bed, because that would still have been too much to bear. I slept so well that I woke up energized. I cleaned up the kitchen (it’s amazing how nasty things get when there’s no power!), vacuumed the carpets (had to turn everything else off to do it, but it was worth it), and pulled out sausage to have for dinner.
The neighbor told us that the local Wal-Mart had opened for business, so Mom and I headed that way to try to find some things that we needed and that might make our lives a little easier. First on my list: a dish drainer. We have a dishwasher. Running on a generator means no using the dishwasher. Fine. I can wash by hand. But drying things is a little more difficult because the counters are full of all the other crap we normally use, but now I need to find the space for dishtowels to put dishes on. Things were getting a little cramped, and the dishtowels were always wet, which is not a good thing when you have no power with which to run a clothes dryer to keep the wet dishtowels from souring and/or mildewing. So, a dish drainer. We also needed a couple more extension cords because the kiddo’s room was really hot and we needed to get some fans in there STAT.
The dish drainer wasn’t a problem. The extension cords were. I wanted two, 25-foot cords. I ended up with two, 7-footers and two, 9-footers. It was just going to have to be good enough. We checked the food section and witnessed the strangest thing ever at Wal-Mart: empty shelves. The entire refrigerated section was empty and roped off. All of it. Produce, dairy, meats, beer & juice…all empty. The bread aisle was empty save for a few packages of hotdog buns. Mom got really excited about those buns until I pointed out to her that we didn’t have any hotdogs to put in them, and Wal-Mart wasn’t selling any at the moment. In the back of one of the shelves were a few loaves of Oatnut sandwich bread, so I grabbed a couple of loaves and called it good enough. The powdered and canned milk section was also empty. Thankfully, we had a few cans of evaporated milk at home, as well as most of a box of powdered milk. If we really HAD to have milk, we could figure it out. I picked up some sodas, just to give us a change from water, some peanuts in the shell for Mom, and that’s about it. The other things we had on our list (milk, eggs, meat) were just going to have to wait.
By the time we got home, it was nearly 5pm, and I wanted to cook us dinner before the sun set so that the house would have plenty of time to cool off. So, as soon as everything was unloaded, I started cooking. Sliced sausage in bbq sauce, steamed & buttered rice, baked beans, and corn on the cob. We were all so happy to have a normal, hot dinner. It’s funny how the smallest bit of normalcy can really make a difference in your mental condition.
After everyone had eaten and the dishes had been scrubbed and set to dry in our brand new, handy dandy dish drainer, we plugged the TV in. Oh yes. It had taken us most of the day, and three different people searching, to find the antenna for the set, but we did find it, hooked it up and were finally able to get a visual on what had been going on since Friday. For the next few hours, we sat in silence, stunned, as we took in the images of our decimated home. I had seen Crosby and parts of Channelview, and had even gotten a glimpse of northern Baytown, but the rest of the Houston area, as well as Galveston county were much worse than I had imagined. It honestly looked like dozens of very strong tornadoes had touched down all over the metro-Houston area. Galveston has not seen such destruction since the 1900 hurricane, before the seawall had been built.
Sleep that night came quickly, if only to escape the images of destruction, and the knowledge of how difficult it will be to recover.
Wednesday
The Kiddo has finally discovered that other children his age live in the neighborhood. As I walk around outside, I’m struck over the numbers of children that are outside playing. On a typical Saturday afternoon, one would think we lived in a retirement community that has age restrictions on the residents. Not so. We live in a very large neighborhood that is simply full of children from newborn to high school. The city’s elementary school is IN this subdivision, for goodness sake! It is a wonderful thing to see children out playing with each other, and mothers gathered together in one garage, watching over the kids and getting in a little social time, as well. This is the way it’s supposed to be! One end of the street has a touch football game going. The next-door-neighbors have small children playing hotscotch (really!) in the driveway. Across the street, several children have gathered (mine included) to play on the huge trampoline that I have never once seen used in over a year of residency here.
He comes into the house during the late afternoon, starving, according to him. He fixes himself a sandwich, some chips, a soda, inhales it all and runs back out. He doesn’t want to miss a moment. A week ago, he couldn’t have cared less that other kids live on this street. His entertainment was the computer and he even communicated with some friends from school over it. As glad as I am that he’s relatively techno-savvy, I would like it just as well if he occasionally spent more time outdoors being physically active. I would rather he looked like his father and less like me. After a brief discussion with the Hubby, we decide that once the power is back on and the Kiddo has had a day or two of computer “fix,” we’re going to start sending him outside more often. Staying inside and moping in his room or listening to his MP3 player will not be an option. I don’t care if he sits at the end of the driveway drawing circles in the dirt. So long as he’s outdoors while he’s doing it. But I have to be the one that makes him. He’s far too willing to let outside playtime go by the wayside.
I cooked dinner again, since it seemed to have such a positive impact on us the night before. We’re running out of useful things to do besides service and refill the generator. More and more, I’m finding the adults pacing (inside and outside), or sitting in the living room staring out the window. We’re all doing the same thing: waiting for the power to come back on. We made chicken & dumplings a few weeks ago and froze the extra, so that’s what I warmed up. It was good and appreciated, but we’re all fading. I can see it.
Thursday
Sleep is becoming harder and harder to come by. The temperatures during the day area creeping back up into the 80’s, even though the nights are still in the 60’s. The house gets hot and stays that way for many, many hours after sunset. It’s well after midnight before I stop sweating long enough for sleep to stop eluding. I have taken my car in today to get an estimate on the repairs. I still don’t know anything because the insurance claim is still too new for it to be showing up in the computer system. So, I wait for something else.
I am worried about school. The Kiddo’s schools have been closed all week, and it’s unlikely they’ll be open before Monday. UHCL is also closed all week, but I’m not sure yet if classes will resume Monday. How does a college make up two weeks of lost class time? I was supposed to be taking a substitute teacher training class this week at Lee College. Lee College overlooks the bay in Baytown. You can actually see the water from the campus. I’m not a full-time student there anymore, so I have no way of finding out what’s going on. They’re not listed on the “school closings” on the news. The school district the college is in (Goose Creek CISD) is closed “indefinitely” or “until utilities return”, depending on which station you’re watching. Will they reschedule the class I was supposed to take, or will they just cancel it since it was only continuing ed in the first place? I don’t know.
I was feeling really tired, so I took a 3-hour nap in the middle of the day. I woke up feeling worse than I started, and even more tired than before. I’m really worried that depression is settling in. Everyone kept asking me what was wrong, but the only answer I could give was that I was tired. Which was true, but why?
Watching the news didn’t help. Eating did; drinking water did. Some. Dad tells us that he’s going to go check on the generator, make sure it has enough fuel to last the night. He’d been out in the garage for a good five minutes when I noticed the lamp on the side table was on. For the past 3 days, Dad has been making trips to the local hardware stores. He doesn’t want to have to worry about the power the next time we have a storm. He wants to set up the main breaker box so that the generator can tie in and power the house in the case of another outage. With the generator in the garage, we have to run extension cords from the gennie to the appliance(s) we want to run. We ended up with cords all over the house, creating quite the trip hazard. Dad wants to eliminate this. We won’t be able to run the a/c or the clothes dryer, but we’d be able to run everything else from the outlets in the wall instead of from extension cords.
I looked at that lamp on the side table for a few seconds, trying to remember when someone hooked it up to an extension cord. Then I noticed that the kitchen lights were on. That was even weirder, because I really couldn’t figure out how Dad had gotten the generator to power lights that had no plug. Then it hit me.
Our power was back on.
Just like that. No fanfare, no warning, no fuss, no muss. I muted the TV and could hear people whooping, hollering and cheering in the street. It was 9:36pm.
I stayed up til about 1am getting Linear Algebra homework done. 1am isn’t bad for me these days since I’m sleeping til 10 or 11…it goes with the territory, I guess. Anyway, the homework I finished last night isn’t due until next week, so I’m a little ahead there. I’ve gotten my assignment for Web Development done for this week, but I really need to get a couple more finished to get a little ahead in that class, as well. I started on next week’s assignment in Classroom Management, but I had too many questions about it to get very far. 
