Quick Note Regarding Hurricane Ike and Aftermath

This is my first opportunity to use electricity since the early hours of Saturday morning and I'll need to make this quick.

I just wanted to thank everyone for their good wishes and thoughts and let you all know how much I appreciate them. We are into our fourth day without power, have cleaned out the refrigerators (tossing a couple of hundred dollars worth of food), have cleaned up around the house as much as possible while waiting for the contractors to show up, etc. Luckily a "cold front" came through about 24 hours ago and it got down to about 58 degrees this morning, so life without air conditioning, even in Houston is not too bad. It's supposed to warm up again by Saturday, though, so we are hoping that we get power back up before that.

There are bad gasoline shortages, with lines of several hours in some cases, and in the northern suburbs FEMA has very little presence so there is no ice to be had. Of course, it's too late for anyone to save any frozen food by now anyway, so ice is not as important as it was a couple of days ago. Overall, I'd have to say that FEMA is doing a pretty poor job of getting things to the people who need them the most - those a few miles south of me in Houston and those in Galveston. The whole process seems to have taken at least 24 hours longer than it should have and Houston authorities seem very frustrated by the approach FEMA has taken.

Some grocery stores and other stores like Target and WalMart are opening and doing their best to make groceries and supplies available to the public. Bottled water is still almost impossible to find up here but most of us have running water and the water is supposdedly drinkable.

That's it for now. Again, thanks to everyone who left good wishes. I sincerely appreciate that and I'm looking forward to something close to "normality" sometime fairly soon.