Hurricane Ike comes to visit

Hello, and it’s great to be back in the land of the living.  I will tell you one thing – I don’t ever want to go through another hurricane.  Remind me to leave town next time.  Well, no one wants to go through a hurricane of course.  But I really didn’t think it would be as bad as it turned out to be; it was a category 2 hurricane.

Several days before Hurricane Ike came ashore, the news stations were still predicting that the storm was heading towards Corpus Christi in South Texas.  Around Wednesday, the forecasters changed the prediction to Port Lavaca, north of Corpus Christi.  Hubby started getting nervous and began making plans to get the windows covered and asked me if we were leaving town.  Now, Hubby always makes mountains out of molehills, so I didn’t really pay attention to his nervous tendencies.  The only thing I could think of was my last experience with Hurricane Rita last year, when 2 million cars were on the freeway at the same time.  I had really been ok in going east to Alabama because no one else planned the route that I was taking and I had the freeway to myself, but the problem was the money – the trip had cost me $350 to $400 that I didn’t have.  So, I turned down Hubby’s invitation to take a vacation at a moment’s notice.  Uh-uh . . . I just didn’t want to do that again. 

 

The surprise came during the day on Thursday, Sept 10, when the forecasters changed the prediction again to around Matagorda Bay.  Furthermore, my sister called with warnings from the nuclear plant about the new storm-course.  I started paying more attention then.  And the rest of the day at work was spent watching the storm’s course.  I don’t believe I concentrated on a thing work-related. 

 

That afternoon after work, I dashed to the storm and bought canned items and more water, then went home.  That evening, we prepared the house as well as we could.  All canned goods were stacked on the kitchen table for easy access, the two flashlights that we could find were on standby in a safe location next to my bed, candles were prepared, bottled water was stacked next to the table, the bathtub was filled with water, every cooler we could locate was filled with water, Hubby covered all of the windows with plywood, and the toys and other debris was removed from the yard.  As a matter of fact, Hubby did a marvelous job in preparing the house for the storm – I was really impressed. 

 

Another surprise popped up also, the forecasters changed the storm’s course again to around Freeport, just south of my home.  So, on Friday, Hubby helped one of the neighbors board up his house, we finished any last minute details for the storm, then ran down to the property to remove the hammock and enjoy the beautiful scenery before the storm, then returned home to “hunker down” as they say.  We moved the vehicles as close to the house as we could to lessen the chance of flooding in the cars.  Then picked up the cats and went indoors closing ourselves off from the rest of the rest of the world for the evening and night ahead.

Tags: hurricane prep