Greetings from "I-ville!"

Well......back from the brink comes good news!

As many of y'all know, MDB and I live in the portion of southeast Texas that was recently ravaged by Ike.

Thanks a lot, Ike.

The hurricane came ashore about 5 miles from our house and did quite a lot of damage here and there, but not much to speak of at Casa del MDB, praise God! Oh, we lost some shingles and had a couple of sections of fence blow over, but compared with the damages sustained in other parts of town, we got nothing at all to speak of!

My former house in Dickinson did about as well, so praise God for that as well!

Over there, all of the windows were spared; I lost NONE of the sheet metal from my patio cover or from the dog kennel, and I did not lose a single shingle!

My storage building was not so fortunate.

One of the neighbors trees fell on it; a 70' red oak. It landed full force on my neighbors storage building and turned it into a pile of scrap metal, but the upper branches fell on my building. In one spot, it merely punched a hole in the wooden decking (an easy enough repair), but in another area, it broke three rafters AND punched a hole in the decking, which means I'm going to have to take it all the way down to the rafters and replace the rafters, decking, roofing felt, and shingles on that side.

I praise God, though, because some people over there had more than one tree fall on their house rather than their unoccupied storage building and their houses are now uninhabitable; I was much more blessed than that!

The storm hit early Saturday, but we'd already hightailed it to the safety of Abilene late Thursday, so we were nowhere near to see it. The traffic was much better this time than the evacuation for Rita a few years ago. If it had not been, I don't think I'd ever think twice about leaving ever again! Anyway, we came back into town at around 4:00 on Sunday and saw widespread devastation, mostly in damaged roofs and fences and downed trees. Water did not appear to be a big issue on our side of the storm (another "thank God!" by the slimmest of margins, we wound up on the "clean" side when the opposite had been forecast for several days before!).

In any case, power outages were widespread as one might imagine. We only got power back on here a few moments ago.

"Don't it always seem as though, that you don't know what you got till its gone?"

Here's to all the folks out there who still have no power AND to everyone who's out there working hard to restore it. I wouldn't have that job for anything!

A few highlights from the evacuation:

*Police officers should allow traffic signals to do their jobs unless traffic is actually backing up because of it. We hit two major snags on the way out of town. The one in Rosenburg could have been avoided if signals had been allowed to do their jobs and the Police would have stayed out of it.
*One good idea they had there in Rosenburg; they put the signals on flashing yellow there on the main drag so that traffic would simple slow to caution and then advance. Sadly, the state of driver's education in this country is abysmal! People kept STOPPING on the flashing yellow instead of rolling through it at a slower pace! I got very frustrated at this little bit of stupidity, and MDB got frustrated with me as a result...........sorry!
*Another Rosenburg highlight; don't attempt to divert northbound traffic onto a southbound highway INTO the path of the storm! ANYBODY OUT THERE GOT A MAP???? Well, the Police directing traffic apparently didn't; they would NOT allow us to continue north on TX36 when we hit US59, so I whipped into a strip mall and then re-entered the northbound lanes from the other side of the intersection.
*The only other major snag was US290 in Brenham. You have to get onto 290 there to continue on 36, so we did so and promptly ran into the "Houston to Austin" traffic jam. If I'd have known that's what it was, I could have gotten into the left lane and gone straight on 36. I'll know better next time!

Another 'THANK GOD!!!!" Thank God for MDB's brother Wes and his darling bride for allowing us to evacuate to their place for three nights. It was a Godsend and we appreciate them a LOT!!!

By the way.....here comes another one. From the time the storm left town until now, the weather here has been SPECTACULAR!!! The nights have been unseasonably cool and the air's been really dry. What's so great about that? With no A/C, it has been a HUGE blessing to have such cool air in the house to sleep in!

All in all, it's been about as good as this sort of thing can be! Praise God!