Here's our house, all boarded up

Hey all, we have survived the Hurricane and are fine!  I’ve put off writing before because I’m still processing it all in my head.  Here’s how it all went down.

The back of our boarded up house.

On Friday morning, September 12th, you would have had NO idea that a hurricane was brewing out in the Gulf.  It was sunny and beautiful.  A great day for putting up plywood.  It started getting windy Friday afternoon.  We saw on TV that the storm surge was starting to hit Galveston and some of the bay communities early on, causing flooding before it even started raining. (The TV stations started 24 hour storm coverage on Thursday, September 11th, and continued broadcasting 24 hours a day until around Tuesday of the next week.  They finally started showing prime time TV that night, and have backed off to almost normal programming now, a week later.)

It finally started raining Friday night, but we didn’t lose power until after midnight.  We had boarded up all the windows and doors and felt safe and sound inside. I saw one of the local TV reporters was reporting from the Galveston County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), which you can see from our house.  So I figured if they were safe enough to run the county from there, then I was safe enough to go to bed (Wes was already asleep in bed by that time — he was exhausted from two days of boarding up windows and moving everything that was outside into the garage).

This is why I heard banging during the night - the fence was banging against the house!

From bed, we could hear the wind was really loud.  I kept hearing something banging, and at the time, I assumed it was up in our attic, but I realize now it was the fence banging against that side of the house.

At one point, we noticed it got all calm and quiet, so know the eye passed right over us.  When it had passed and the wind started back up it was way worse – way more rain, way more wind and much, much louder.

Everyone has asked, “Weren’t you afraid?”  Actually, no, I was never really afraid.  I was concerned and I was very aware of what was going on, but I was never afraid.  Others have asked, “Why aren’t you evacuating?  They are telling everyone to evacuate on TV?”  That’s not totally accurate.  They were telling those on Galveston island’s West end to evacuate, then later they were telling everyone on Galveston to evacuate, and then Houston told those zip codes on Galveston Bay to evacuate.  But they told everyone else to stay put.  To stay out of the way of those who needed to get out of town.  Unless, of course, you lived in a trailor or other unsafe place.  And that wasn’t us, so we stayed.

Saturday was miserable without power (I feel so bad for those who are still without power).  We got out of the house after breakfast to check out the damage.  We made out really well.  We lost a section of fence, and one tree blew over, but no damage to the house.  They are building a Lowe’s behind us and the whole neighborhood was littered with insulation and other junk from there.  Lots of young trees are down in our neighborhood, and lots of fences.  We drove around League City that morning and some places had roofs torn off, bill boards were down, traffic signs had just bent in half and traffic lights were dangling.  It was crazy.

My poor ficus tree! It got bent in half by the wind!

I was surprised that we lost cell phone coverage.  l had thought we’d have that for sure.  Made it hard to call family and let them know we were all OK.

We took some of the plywood down on Saturday afternoon so we could open windows.  But it was so hot and there was no breeze, it didn’t really help at all.  Almost 24 hours after it went out, the power came back on.  We think ours came back on so fast because of our close proximity to the Galveston EOC.

That's a big piece of the insulation that blew over from Lowes next to my car tire.

Now, a week later, our home is about back to normal. The plywood has been put away, the fence is fixed, the trees have been staked upright.  Things are pretty good in League City.  Grocery stores are almost back to normal (still low on refrigerated and frozen things, like meat and milk and eggs, but getting more stuff every time I go to the store.)  Most gas stations are open and have gas (and no, the rumors about gas being $5+ per gallon are not true).  We have been spending lots of time outside, due to the fixing things and putting things away, which our dog Katy is loving.  She loves being outside with us.

If you go out of LC, though, there are lots of stop lights still not working – some not working at all, some are flashing – and gosh, does NO one know how to go through a 4 way stop???  Lots of places still without power, so not everything is open.  I’ve been driving as little as possible because its scary (will someone run a stoplight that’s out and cause an accident???), and it takes a really long time to get through some of these “4 way stops”, so even “quick” trips take a long time.

In an effort to get back to normal, I made both boys start homeschool again yesterday.  Camden’s school district pushed back their reopening day to next Monday and I told the kids that was too freaking long to be out of school when we had only been in it 2 1/2 weeks to begin with.  Camden is doing history reading and science with us, and his own language arts and math.  Yesterday went really well, so we were all happy.

I know a lot of areas still don’t have power, but I’m impressed with what they have done so far.  Houston is a huge city and more than half of it has power again already.  They even  have power back on in small parts of Galveston island, and they thought it would be months before that would happen.  Wow.

So anyway, that’s our story.  Thanks to everyone who called, or emailed, to check on us and to all who kept us in their thoughts and prayers.  We are so grateful!

Sherri