Judging by the time blinking on my yet-to-be-reset alarm clock, our power came back on at 7:30pm this evening, bringing our total time without power to 7 days and 16 hours.

I have lots to write about Ike and about Atlas Shrugged, which I devoured in the absence of the internet. But for now I’m just reporting in. We are totally fine. We lost of a bunch of condiments and natto from the fridge and would have welcomed the luxury of hot water (no running water for the first three days post-Ike at all; no hot water until the power came back), but we prepared adequately and thus we’ve been living more comfortably than you would on an average camping trip.

Which is obviously not the case for large swaths of the greater Houston area and up and down the Gulf coast; we’re among the lucky ones. Please donate to the relief effort if you can.

We’re all set here and just waiting for the storm. I’ll probably be online for a few more hours before turning off the computer and unplugging.

As I said before, we’re far enough inland that we’ll escape the storm surge (i.e., we are nowhere near the massive flooding you see on CNN right now). Hopefully the winds won’t do anything too nasty.

We’re stocked up on food and water and should be good for at least three days after the storm.

See y’all on the other side!

Well, this has been an exciting first hurricane season for me.

This post is really more for people who actually know me and my husband and want to know how we’re faring.

We are west of downtown Houston and thus not in an evacuation zone (meaning we are not in danger of major flooding from the storm surge) and we are currently planning to shelter the storm in place. People are still evacuating from the coast and we don’t need to be adding to the mess. All major evacuation routes are currently jammed according to Google Traffic.

We’re stocked up on food and water. Forecasts for our area predict nasty wind and rain, but not enough to do significant structural damage. We think we’ll be fine, especially if the storm track moves east.

However, we’ve taken the precaution of eating all the ice cream left in the freezer.

I’ll try to post an update tomorrow before unplugging my computer.