Evacuees on their way

My cousin Matt, his wife Emily, and their five children Hannah, Josh, Caroline, Sarah-Kate and Evie (Houston residents) are on their way to Mom's house in Denton. I look forward to getting to see them this weekend, of course, but I'm praying their house and property stay safe in the oncoming mess.

I've been through one hurricane in my life -- Hurricane Allen, back in 1980, when we lived in Corpus Christi. Allen was a real monster, as you can see in the Wikipedia article linked. Mom and I evacuated to Dallas to my Aunty Ada's house, but Dad worked the emergency room at the hospital. When we returned to our home (which we had carefully boarded up with plywood on all the windows), we found that something really large had slammed into the plywood on the window in my bedroom, shattering the glass underneath it and allowing buckets of water to pour in. There were a couple of inches of water standing in my bedroom, damaging my bedroom furniture and ruining lots of stuff. Also, I believe the storm surge was quite nasty, since Corpus was on the "dirty" side of the eyewall.

Any-hoo, up thisaway Hurricane Ike is due to be at his worst on Saturday afternoon and evening. He should be just a TS by then, but we're predicted to get 4-8 inches of rain.

On a completely different subject, I need to head off to bed. I have to be at school by 6AM tomorrow morning to help the school picture photographers get into the gym to set up. Oy.