Hurrication Update

thanks to everyone who has emailed and called me. i appreciate your concern about us. we're alive and safe. we are at a la quinta in san marcos, tx., which is in what is called the I-35 corridor between san antoniio and austin.

we boarded up our home and packed and left friday morning. got on interstate 10 about noon-thirty. our trip took about an hour longer, due to stop and go traffic on the west side of houston, but all in all was a pretty good trip.

hubs was not going to leave at all, and i had decided to stay with him because i tried to look into the future and how i would feel if missy and i evacuated without him and something happened to him. we told missy she could go but she felt like i did.

friday morning i decided to ask hubs what our gameplan was for weathering the storm. our bedroom hall is the only space not walled by windows. so we were going to sit there. then i asked him, what if the storm surge comes? what if our roof comes off? his answer to leaving had been, where do we go? so when i asked him to really, really, look at what would we do in the house were Ike to destroy it, he finally began to see logic. so, we looked online for a hotel and found one that took pets right off. good omen. we packed and left. lots left behind, as in our entire lives. but what can you do?

even evacuated to a safe place with internet and air conditioning, the last few days have been very traumatic for us. it's been next to impossible to find information about the status of our locality. eventually, by late saturday and sunday, we began to hear from friends and family. my brother works for our city and he had to weather the storm at his home, which survived 8 tall pine trees falling and barely missing it. he was on call so he had to navigate the roads at 6 pm saturday to go to work on a skeleton crew clearing the roads and then manning the phones at the emergency call center.

my brother found time to drive to our home and found it in great condition, thank goodness. the top of the chimney that keeps water out had flown off and the back fence is leaning, and that is all. i cannot tell you how much of a relief that was. our street never flooded, even though we are 1/4 mile from cedar bayou, which flows into galveston bay. we were not in a mandatory evac zone because our land is very high. it is on a plate separate from the bottomland that is pretty much sea level.

we are about 25 feet above sea level. and we do not have flood insurance because we were always told we do not need it. i probably do not need to tell you that hubs and i were sweating it out heavily, since all of the meteorological warnings predicted a 22 foot storm surge up into galveston bay and its tributaries, cedar bayou being a main one of those and the houston ship channel aka buffalo bayou being the other main one. i had figured we were just f*cked. my mindset was, hey, i was never gonna use all those art supplies anyway. lol, trying to rationalize so the sting and hurt would be lessened.

so, anyway, here we are today. our house still has no electricity and the water is not drinkable due to the water plant being flooded. hubs helped bring the refinery down on thursday before he left work and it is still down until they can get proper power, but all reports from his coworkers who were on shelter-in duty there are good. the refinery sustained very little damage and it hardly rained there at all. they are ready to bring it back up, but the utility infrastructure of the area is delaying it. you might live in a new area where the utilities are underground, but on my gulf coast they are largely hobbled together above ground, pole to pole, susceptible to wind, trees, wild animals and lightning. just my 2 cents, but if the gov't wanted to help lessen the effects of weather along the gulf coast, they would use the rebuild dollars on relocating the utility infrastructures underground where possible. every time this happens, that is what is damaged the most. who listens to little old me though.

I waited til today to update the blog because the wireless router for our hotel building wasn't working until today. i was going to find another hotel if it hadn't been fixed by today. like hubs said, if the tv in the hotel room didn't work, he'd be pissed. same with my internet, jeebus. anyway, all is well for time being at least.

hubs left to go back this morning. he just couldn't wait around. he had to go back and check out what's going on. me, i am planning to stay right here in san marcos until our water and electricity are back online and good. poor missy is really distraught. she spent all weekend refusing to give up hope that she could return to school in beaumont today, despite us telling her that was a pipe dream. the downtown there had 9 feet of water in it. they and western louisiana got pelted by ike just as much if not more than we did. missy and her school friends spent all weekend trying in vain to find out when they were supposed to be back at school.

we finally found out this morning that missy's tentative date to return to school is Sept. 29, and that is at the earliest. turns out that a lot of the campus flooded. her dorm room is on the 3rd floor, so luckily her room did not flood, and the roof is still okay. she is still not happy about having all that time to fill though. i feel bad for her, but she is really impatient by nature, so it is gonna be testy, lol.

well, she wants to go see "burn after reading" so we are off to do that. i'll check back in later...

Watery Wednesday Wrap-ups

I do hope those of you who read this blog remembered that I was up to my arss in tax returns and would not be counted on to blog with any regularity. Just in case you thought I drowned....

I almost did, but only figuratively. Man, the procrastinators on my client list are just gonna have to speed things up next year, cuz I'm getting too old for double all-niters (yep, I did not sleep from Saturday evening until Monday afternoon, then took a nap and stayed up again Monday night, just barely making the midnight deadline on my last 2 returns). When folks bring you moving boxes full of craps on the Thursday and Friday before a Monday deadline, ya kinda haveta stay up. But, no worries, they will get theirs, for I will remember this at invoicing time! LOL

Bad thing is, I did not have time to do my usual thorough start-to-finish on each client, so all my paperwork is still to be done for them, like document file copies, printing, collating, packaging and invoicing. And that all needs to be done this week in order to get paid before Christmas, because it starts all over again right after that! And plus, I want some time off. I want to at least pretend to be a seasonal worker! LOL

So anyway, back to drowning...good segueway to the one thing I did do yesterday (Tuesday) besides sleep all.day.long. I took off with my camera and snapped some shots of water for this week's Funky Photo Friday challenge. I really had fun doing this, although it was more difficult to get interesting shots than I anticipated. Once I figured out to use my zoom, though, it got easier. Didn't get up early enough to catch sunrise and didn't want to wait long enough to get sunset, so I had to settle for overcast midday. Then, I took the photos and editied them in PaintShopPro, some lightly, some heavily. So, I learned some new moves, not that I'm gonna remember them, LOL. One can hope.

That first shot (above) looks like a waterfall, right? Well, It's not. It's water rushing out of a bayou dredging outflow pipe into a containment pond. What I did was zoom in on the water when I snapped it. Then, back at my computer, I used the curves function to add some heavy duty whitecaps. I love how it came out, but I confess I did not know beforehand that I was going to do that. I was just playing around with the different things in my PSP. I had read of lots of people using this functions, so I thought, what does this do? Me likey!

This next photo (at left) is just barely edited with an unsharp mask and a tiny bit of brightening. This is a tributary gully creek that winds through my city and has the infamous nickname Gator Gully. More than a few alligators have been sighted on its banks over the years. There's luckily a safe concrete perch near the banks where I stood to take the shot, so no Aimeslees were sacrificed for it, LOL.

I have to admit, I had the most fun editing this photo (at left). This is just a boring old shot of our dirty brown bayou and bank near my house that flows into Galveston Bay. Boring shots like these make me want to glitz them up, so I went exploring in PSP's Effects. This one was done using the Rotating Mirror Reflection Effect. What it does is rotate part of your image however you tell it. This one is a very slight rotation, clockwise -- can you see it? What is cool is that it created a digital smush in the upper righthand quadrant that kind of looks like there's a buddhist fairy with wings sitting there on the grass. Click on any of these for a larger view.

Well, I have to say that during my overtime at work I almost literally ached to do some creative playing. I missed it that much. And I even missed blogging. Yet, no rest for the weary. As I explained, I'll be working on finishing up the paperwork, tomorrow it's to the dentist for a cleaning, and then I will be on vacation until November 1. Not from blogging, I'll still blog daily (ok, that's the plan). But I won't be crafting for that time. The crafting supplies are going to get packed up and put away, and I'm going to tackle the remaining parts of our house reorganization.

My goal is to have most of it done by Oct. 28th, which is the next day off for DH. I need to move my computer and internet cable to my front office from the family room, as well as clean up all the accumulated crap from the family room and the front dining room and office. Then, once that goal is met, I can work in my spare time on cleaning out the back 10' x 22' room behind the garage and making it into our fitness gym! I am so jazzed at the thought of getting that done that the mere visualization of it is enough to get me moving, even when I'm in pain. Hubs wants it badly too, and we really only have this remaining window of time open, since I need to use Missy's room to store stuff in while I move other stuff around. And she will be home for Thanksgiving. So, the craftings gotta go for now. Also, I won't be online as much, but that's going to be a good thing, because I've noticed that my old bones are less painful the less time I spent at the keyboard, ya know?

So, you have all been told! LOL Please, if ya see me online alot, feel free to whip me and yell at me to get back on plan! I just feel that if I get somewhere with this, my life's gonna improve to the next level, cuz all of this clutter and stuff not being where I want it to be is bugging the caniption outta me. And being able to use all of our gym equipment, OMG, I literally cannot wait!

Have a great HUMPerdink DAY, everybody. (Gina, I will do your tag on Thursday, okay?)