Life in Exile

We're sitting pretty here in Austin. My son's bronchitis is clearing up, and we have open grocery stores and a full set of amusements are at our disposal. We've been sort of an information clearing center for our friends who have no power or Internet access.

Mr. Dewberry went back today to check on our house (still without power, and no estimate as to a restoration date) and to do some more clean-up. We opted to leave the kids here in Austin for health and convenience reasons. I've been figuring out a few things to do; we may even go out and find a letterbox today. We certainly need to get out of the house--we're getting a little stir crazy.

It's day-to-day on the planning and it's hard to figure out exactly what to do. 85% of the schools in our district are still without power, so you can't open the schools until you can run the electrical systems and check to make sure they're safe. On top of that, gas supplies are still tight, so there's no gas for things like school buses. They'll announce on Friday the plans for next week.

Mr. Dewberry took some supplies to last him a few days. There are many restaurants and stores open in Houston now, although the lines can be long. My zip code still has 14,000 customers without power. Our neighborhood has a lot of beautiful old trees, and those trees are splintered and lying all over power lines. Power lines are severed and there are still lines lying on the ground in lots of areas. It seems like a huge job, and the company is estimating that half of its customers will have power by next Tuesday. Hope we're in that group.