767 miles and closing

I love that Mesquite tree.  What character.  Hold on Mesquite tree, don’t let the wind knock you over!!

Portland, Texas

Wednesday, 1:30 p.m.

Ike

The neighborhood is relatively quiet.  I heard the guy next door mowing earlier (we’ll do that later).  In the distance, the usual traffic noises are quiet.  I can hear a few power saws, an occasional drill, some hammering.  

A handful of houses on our street have the windows boarded, but are still occupied.  I suspect by this evening most of the windows will be boarded.  I think we’ll board tomorrow.  It’s like a cave in here with all the windows covered.  I don’t want to live in a cave any longer than I have to.  

The HEB (grocery store, for those of you outside of South Texas) was much busier than normal at eight o’clock this morning, but still  not crazy.  I’d put money that it’s getting crazier as the day progresses.  

No evacuation orders have been made.  Yet.  Local authorities continue to confer to determine What To Do Next.  

At the high school: corralled chaos.  Parents calling continuously to determine when/if school will be cancelled/dismissed.  Students asking when/if they will be sent home.  Partner tells them that the school’s keeping them at school so they don’t get in the way while their parents prepare.  It’s only a small stretch of the truth.  I suspect the other schools are experiencing an equally agitated population.  I’ll find out when the Sonars come home in a couple of hours.  

I have photographed our home and its contents inside and out.  This is easier than making a list.  I tell myself that this is a good idea, pragmatically.  There’s a tiny emotional part of me that hopes this photographic documentation will not be used for insurance purposes, or to laugh over “what the house looked like before Ike” in 10 years.  Mostly what I get out of the pictures, though, is that our house is a mess.   Who cleans up around here, anyway?

I have a list.  Or two.  Ok, I have three lists, and I anticipate at least one more.  How does one count the number of lists if there are sublists embedded within a list?  There is a list of things to do before we leave.  A list of things to take with us (with sub-categories, many sub-categories, such as which food, which clothes, which meds, which yarn).  A list of people to call or email (many of those have already called or emailed me, which makes that list easy.)

We have an evacuation point and an alternate evacuation point.  Our go-to is usually Partner’s folks, but they’re right in the path of the storm (albeit a few hundred miles inland) with tropical storm winds forecast for them.  So, we may be taking a mini-vacation in beautiful downtown San Angelo.  I’m hoping for a Matthew McConaughey siting.  Or perhaps Los Lonely boys.  Now *that* would be a good birthday present.  

No, seriously, what I really want for my birthday (Which is Sunday.  Thank you, I’ll be 35, though my father is claiming that he is not old enough to have a child of 35), is to wake up Sunday morning and find that our neighbors and friends are safe and that our homes are still livable.  That would be great.  

More later.  

We live on a pretty street.  Lots of trees.  All of them still vertical.  

Anticipation

“The waiting is the hardest part.”  Tom Petty

There’s another monster coming.

Right now, we’re in the center of the target for this one.  Shrill voices with frightening graphics are cautioning us not to panic.  Yet.  There is still a large margin of uncertainty for the storm.  It *could* hit anywhere on the Texas coast.  Theoretically.  

Realistically, the center of the storm is most likely to make landfall somewhere between Corpus Christie and Galveston.  Um.  Oh, that’s sort of, well.  HERE!  

Right now Ike has just finished with Cuba, spending much of its energy and weakening to a Category 1 storm.  Between there and HERE though, is a lot of warm Gulf water and just the right kind of air and swirling to feed the monster, and so it’s very likely to strengthen before it gets HERE, with an uncomfortably high chance that it could land as a Category 4 storm.  Right now, the spread of hurricane force winds for this storm is about 75 miles, give or take.  That’s 75 miles of winds in excess of 75 miles per hour.  And that’s if it stays a Category 1.  If it lands at Category 4, well, that’s 75 or more miles with winds in excess of 131 miles per hour, with a gradually diminishing high wind field that extends well beyond that.  

So, you know, if this one lands within a hundred miles of HERE, it’s going to be pretty darn windy.  Oh yes.  

But no one wants to jump out there and say what comes next.  Evacuation.  

Not yet.  

Evacuation is expensive and messy.  The Louisiana evacuation for Hurricane Gustav went well by most accounts.  But Texas has not forgotten the horrifying evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005.  An evacuation that killed more people than the storm they were fleeing. 

So we’re waiting.  Waiting for someone to say, welp, don’t panic, but it’s time to get the heck out of Dodge.  

A couple of school districts have suspended classes for the rest of the week (not ours).  Buses are amassing at key staging areas.  Neighbors are buying groceries and plywood.  And batteries and bottles of water.  

We have that.  

We have a folder of important documents to take with us that will help us get back to our house afterward if there is massive destruction.  That will help us do whatever it is that has to be done to put things back together when they’re ripped apart by wind and rain and waves.  We have a list of the other “stuff” that will go with us in the car if we leave.  

The incredibly cool and lovable biker chick across the street is staying.  So is her hammer-wielding partner (who could not look more like Mr. Clean if he tried, except maybe for the white t-shirt).  She’s promised to keep an eye on things and shoot any looters.  Ok, she didn’t promise that this time.  That was when we left for Rita.  

So tonight we wait.  On the off-chance that those wacky steering currents will send this storm across the less densely populated parts of South Texas.  We can hope.  

But in reality.  My gut tells me the storm is coming HERE.  Maybe not right to this spot.  But close enough.  I’m not worried, or panicked, I’ll be ready tomorrow to wake up and do what we have to do to secure the house as best we can, pack what is crucial and irreplaceable, what we need to care for ourselves.  Ready to reassure the kids about what is happening, what isn’t happening, and that the adults are doing our best to keep us all as safe as we can.  

I am a little (ha) scared though.  I have these moments where I sort of choke a bit, wondering if I can cram one more thing in the car.  If I’ll see this table again.  If that tree will crush my bedroom.  If the roof will be ripped off.  And then what?  This worry happens during the waiting.  During the times where there isn’t much to do except wait for the next step.  This worry and the little choke is set aside during the doing what has to be done.  This worry erupts in the quiet moments in between.  

The hardest part.   

Ketchup

A mish mash of things I’ve been wanting to write about.  But not all of them.  There’s still that name thing and the GOP VP candidate and stuff like that.  And my kids.  Who are great.  And I love to talk about them.  So there’s no explanation for why I’m talking about knitting and herbiculture.  

Ok, so Mystery Stole 4 started last Friday with the release of the first clue.  I got halfway through that clue with the orange beads:

But decided the orange beads were wayyyyyy too much.  Then I wept at the six or eight (I lost track) hours worth of work that went into that few inches and ripped it out.  Ok, I didn’t weep, but I sighed a lot.  I did get to have fun steaming the crinkles out of the yarn by pulling it through the whistle hole on my boiling teakettle (yeah, don’t read that too fast, it makes it sound dirty). 

I started over with yellow beads.  And a lot of cursing.  

 

Yes, I know the yellow is harder to see, but seriously, I like the subtlety of it so much more.  

In other knitting news… Here’s Deployment Sock the first, right before I finished it.  It’s finished now.  I hope to cast on the second one soon.  Maybe.  If I don’t start kilt hose.  Or evacuate.  Evacuation puts a crimp on all knitting.  

This is a picture of one of the trees in the yard across the street from ours.  People ask us what it is all the time.  We didn’t know, and neither do the current residents because they didn’t plant it.  But it’s pretty and it grows fast, and I finally had to know.  

Meet Royal Poinciana.  Good shade tree.  I hope it’s still there next week.  

Yes, I’ll talk about Ike later.  

The All Clear

The Hurricane is over.  Everyone return to your regularly scheduled sweating.  

Here is the extent of our damage:

Please note that this thirty-foot section of fence separating our back yard from our right-hand neighbor’s back yard was completely rotten prior to Hurricane Dolly.  She just finished off two boards.  We thought briefly about going out during the worst of the wind and pushing down the rest of it. 

But then we started doing this.   Can anyone guess what we’re using for tile spacers (because we were too cheap to shell out the $2.39 for a bag of fifty spacers so that we could set six tiles)?

Drip, Drip, Drip, Goes the Water

That’s a Chumbawamba song, from the Tubthumper album.

Anyway, during my first hour of measuring, my fancy pluviometer measured about 20 mm of rain.  That included at least two waves of rain bands.

The second hour saw both a lull in the rain and an increase in winds, and I measured only about 3 mm of rain.  The blusterier it gets, the less accurate my delicate fluviograph.  

Hours three and four, trace.  Maybe one mm.  Maybe.

Hey look! Watermelon!

This beauty was 36.5 pounds and grew at the family compound in Central Texas.  Lovely.