Karen Jacot / the blog

We survived Ike, but it wasn’t fun. It was pretty scary. We weathered the storm in the corporate apartment we’ve been living in, which we moved out of this weekend (after Ike hit–talk about bad timing). In hindsight, we should have just stayed in our house, but we didn’t know. Our house had no major damage, but we did lose a lot of branches off the sycamore tree in our backyard and the fence is leaning in a spot. Of course we had lots of debris, like everyone.

We had no power and they were still saying it could be 2-4 weeks before all neighborhoods have power again, so Lyle and I left yesterday and drove up to my mom’s in Dallas, where there is electricity and food aplenty. Before we left, I sat in line for 2 hours at the only gas station I could find with any gas.

Here are two photos taken from our 13th floor apartment the night before Ike hit. These were taken just a couple minutes apart, the first looking west, and second looking southeast.

The hurricane hit us overnight, knocking out our power (including water in our 13th floor apartment), making a lot of noise, and generally being very nasty. It blew out the windows in the lobby, and then the lobby flooded, and you could hear (and feel) the air blowing like mad even in the hallway outside the doors. Finally the wind died down, the rain slowly stopped, and the flooding in the streets subsided pretty quickly.

At our new house we met lots of our neighbors as we were all outside cleaning up debris. They loaned us rakes and ladders and even offered food. And one of our neighbors has a good sense of humor.

Hurricane Ike is on its way. It’s expected to make landfall in Galveston around 1am tonight and hit downtown Houston around 7am tomorrow morning. We’ve taken what precautions we can, stocked up on water and food, and we’re now just waiting. The forecasters have been building this up for so long now that the waiting is just seeming to go on and on and on.

The worst of it in the area I’m in is supposed to be very strong winds, not flooding. They’re telling people to expect to be without electricity for at least a few days. I’ll post again when I can. Good luck to everyone in the Houston area! See you on the other side of my first hurricane…

Better late than never…I’m finally reporting that we have a house! And the movers finally delivered our stuff from California this morning (after a few delays) so we are about to start unpacking and getting settled in. Yippee!