Thar she blows! - or rather he, since its name was Ike.

So the other day, Friday the 12 and Saturday the 13, I experienced Hurricane Ike. It was pretty exciting. All day Friday I was like, what can I do to prepare... I had a high level of stress the whole day. The anticipation was killing me. I ended up taking all my pictures off the walls - in case the windows broke and made them fly around with all the wind.. I covered or put my electronics in case of windows breaking or leakage.. made my little hurricane center in my bathroom and hallway. Where I live I basically have a wall of windows all along my apartment. So I didn't really want to sleep right under it, in case it broke from the hurricane winds or any tornados that were spurned. So I actually slept in the hallway away from windows in the middle of my apartment. Danny made fun of me for it, but I figure it was good to be prepared, and my other friend didn't think it was a dumb idea. Plus besides the safety issues, since it was away from my chimney and windows it was quiet so I could actually sleep.

So my power went out at 1am on Friday. I was expecting this though, but I did not expect the speed at which I got it restored - only 17 hours later! And this is when there were like 2 million people in Houston without power. I was one of the first to get it restored and I got internet with it. Danny never lost power, but his internet still isn't working. Also lots of my friends were without power for almost a week... some haven't gotten it restored yet. There are whole parts of town without power, you can see it from the freeway - whole business districts, restaurants, houses, etc.. Some of the grocery stores still run out of perishable goods, and some opened their doors to sell goods with all their perishable goods covered since they weren't for sale because they perished. I've walked around and driven around. Houston doesnt seem like it was too badly hit, there were definitely a lot of trees down, some car ports crushed cars, some messed up traffic lights, some brick walls fell, lots of down shingles (at my apt), and there was definitely damage, but then the lower lying places and those near big water sources (lakes and bayous), and galveston really got hit badly. They still haven't opened some spots that were under mandatory evacuation to the public and people who live in these areas. But in Houston there was a mandatory city-wide curfew for a week (just got lifted on Sunday the 21), and there are some really dark areas with no power and some roads and freeways were flooded for a day or two after the hurricane... it was quite the experience. Since I was back to normalcy pretty quickly, and there wasn't too much damage around me, and it was kinda cool to have a hurricane experience, I'm glad I stayed, but in the future if a strong category 3, cat 4, or cat 5 hurricane is coming my way, I'm not sure I'd stay. Ike only hit us as a cat 2 (though they say the storm surge - like at galveston and such was as bad at like a cat 4 or 5 since the hurricane was so huge - I mean on satellite it looked like it covered the whole gulf of mexico!). At my apartment and area around me they had gusts of wind at about 90 mph and about 8" of rain... And that would only get worse with a stronger storm... and I saw the damage that it caused... Anyways, I've been meaning to write in my real journal about this for about a week and a half.. but I haven't gotten around to it yet, so I thought I'd document it somewhere, maybe if I can figure out how to post pictures I'll post some on here... or maybe I'll just link you to a site where they are at.