Surviving Ike...

Well, survived the Hurricane. Just got my phone line/internet back a few minutes ago thanks to an extremely overworked AT&T employee. He was actually very pleasant, I don't know if I would be if I was working 15 hour days trying to restore service to hundreds and thousands of people. He told me a great story about a guy who built his home around a utility pole.

Most of the damage in my area was due to large falling trees. Fortunately the trees in front of my home did not fall down. Some of the neighbors were not so lucky, but I have only heard of 1 injury due to this, so most people got lucky. The neighbors (first time meeting a couple, sad to say!) and we spent about two days cleaning up debris, and the City is slowly picking up the piles of dead branches block by block and taking them to be recycled into mulch. (That's a LOT of mulch!) My driveway also doubles as a detention pond for the open storm drain, so it was like working in a rice paddy. No major damage to the house, but I got to report all the already broken stuff the landlord has neglected as "hurricane damage".

My neighbor is an 85 year old man named Johnny, who sounds like Boomhauer from King of the Hill, and he is a machine. This guy worked 12 hours straight for two days cleaning up, helping neighbors, etc. just because "he had nothing better to do" with the power off.

We lost power from Saturday early morning until late Tuesday night. It wasn't that bad because fortunately a cool front came in Sunday morning (Saturday night was rough!). The sound of the neighbors generator tends to make one a bit envious. I ended up getting a heck of a lot of reading done with a miner's flashlight. Gets DARK! 4 Robert Heinlein novels and two comic book history books, so I can't complain.

Some people still do not have power and it varies not only block to block but one side of the street to the next. Some streets you will see 5 or 6 extension cords crossing the street and you know this is the case. (neighbors across the street didn't get power til Friday, which makes one feel guilty. They are busting their butt trying to get all the utilities back on for everyone. 90% of the traffic signals died, so as they are repairing these, traffic is horrible (Treat it as a 4 way stop-Huh!). I never appreciated how efficient traffic signals are until now.

All family and friends are OK...some had their houses damaged, but are physically OK, which one is grateful for. It should get back to normal soon.

...funny, "internet" is not in the spellchecker for Blogger...