Hurricane Rita Anniversary

Three years ago today, most of my family and I were in Arkansas at my brother's house evacuated for Hurricane Rita. Today, southeast Texas is in the very beginning of its recovery after Hurricane Ike. My brain is still fuzzy from Ike and also still has a few cobwebs left over from Rita.

Soon, the constant worrying that is on the edge of my thoughts will gradually recede and I will go back to being the non-worrying, always in denial Laurie that I was before Rita and that I was in those brief three years between Rita and Ike and before Humberto...and Eduoard...and Gustav...and let's not forget Katrina.

Luckily my brain has a low tolerance for seeing the possibility of doom and gloom in every possible situation and the backhoe of optimism will scoop away the dark thoughts of negative possibilities lurking around every corner and replace them with the bright happy thoughts of the perpetually blooming dimwit, nincompoop that is the real me.

Come on backhoe of happiness. Sock it to me.

Texas Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus Emergency Information System

This is a fantastic resource which I only found out about this morning. When we evacuated for Hurricane Rita, we were competing for hotel rooms with the population of the Houston and Galveston area which were also evacuating. All hotel rooms were booked all the way to Dallas.

Click here to see hotel room availability in Texas during emergency situations. I can't vouch for the accuracy, of course, but I'm going to assume it's a good indication of room availability.

Update on our evacuation plans: My mom, dad and sisters and I are staying put. My aunt and cousins in Port Arthur are going to Dallas. I don't know, yet, what my cousins in mid-county are doing. My guess is they won't be evacuating either.

Happy Hurricane Rita Anniversary! - CLICK HERE

My Hurricane Rita Anniversary Post

I'm late by a few days, but, following Jack's lead (okay, copying his idea), I give you a rerun of my posts during Hurricane Rita. They aren't nearly as exciting as trees on houses and falling off roofs, but, they're mine. Off we go...

Weird Fortune - Part Two (9/20/05)

(Trying to) Get the Hell Out of Dodge (9/22/05)

One Last Post (9/22/05)

F**k Me Running (9/22/05)

We Made It, How About You (9/24/05)

Thanks First United Methodists (9/25/05)

House Update (9/25/05)

House Damage (9/25/05)

Adventure of the Day (9/26/05)

Have You Ever Kissed Your Car (9/27/05)

A Brief Update (9/28/05)

First Funny Story From Our Hurricane Adventure (9/29/05)

Planning to Go Home (10/1/05)

Next Year's Hurricane Names (10/2/05)

I'm Home (10/4/05)

Weird Fortune - Part Three (10/5/05)

Calm Before the Storm (10/7/05)

Poor Bastard (10/9/05)

How the table of beers looked through Jack's eyes...

While you're just hanging out reading blogs, go over to Jack's place and read his reprise of his award-winning Hurricane Rita posts. * (Picture art work done by the multi-talented Jack.)



* He didn't really win any awards but, to paraphrase Lesley Gore, it's my bloggy and I'll lie if I want to.

Orleans Street Jazz Fest

Today is Beaumont's first annual Orleans Street Jazz Fest. I'm very excited about this and have high hopes it will become an annual event. My past experience with events like this is that they get bigger and better every year.

Beaumont's Blues Fest was canceled last year due to Hurricane Rita but I think, barring unforseen weather related pains in the ass, will be held again this October.

I'll keep you posted.

Nudity at the Dollar General

I abruptly woke up last night at 3:00 a.m. from a dream that wasn't even a nightmare. It involved evacuation and a Frank Lloyd Wright style resort somewhere in east Texas which had a spring fed swimming pool and a softball field next door.

Those of us who evacuated together for Hurricane Rita were there and, for some reason, we were trying to find a guy my sister used to bowl with who was supposedly playing softball at the field beside the resort. Perhaps something frightening happened in the dream that I don't remember because when I woke up, my heart was beating out of my chest and I felt afraid.

Of course, you care nothing about that because you're here to read about the nudity at the Dollar General store, aren't you? That dream came from one of my co-workers. In her dream, she went in the Dollar General stark naked with her hands over her breasts, walked up to one of the workers in the store and said in exasperation, "I just need a toothbrush!"

I guess she only had one dollar.

Penny Lane is in My Ears and in My Eyes...Very Strange

Sometimes several coincidences occur in my life that make me stop and wonder what the meaning might be. Most of the time, I can't find a meaning and this is one of those times.

When I was about 12 years old, my mom’s step-sister and her son lived in a duplex in Beaumont. The people who lived next door had a daughter named Penny. I remember her name because, that summer, Penny Lane was a big Beatles hit. I also remember that she loved the Cowsills which I found odd. I never knew anyone who was obsessed with the Cowsills.

Many years later, I got a job in Beaumont and the building I worked in was in the same neighborhood where I remembered my aunt and Penny’s houses to be. I always wondered if I could find those two houses. I knew I would recognize them because my aunt’s house was a brick duplex and Penny’s house was a wood frame house with a little porch on the side facing my aunt’s house.

Several months ago, after working in this building off and on for the last twenty years, I was looking out of my fifth floor window and it hit me like a bolt of lightning. There were the houses. I had a direct view of them from my office window. I had always thought the houses were on Liberty or Laurel when they were actually on Broadway. I've had this office with this view for about three years and never noticed the houses until sometime late last summer.

When I got back to work after the evacuation for Hurricane Rita, I saw that a tree had fallen through the roof of Penny’s house. Sometime around Christmas, I watched as they finally hauled the tree away and this week they removed the blue tarp and repaired the roof.

Along with my revelation last summer that the houses were right outside my window, here are the other coincidences which really started piling up this week into one surreal moment:

1. For my birthday last September, my sister found an old Beatles poster we used to have hanging in our bedroom when we were teenagers and she had it framed and gave it to me as my birthday present.
2. For Christmas, Cory and Jamie gave me the two DVD set of the Concert for Bangladesh. I had been looking for it for years and I didn’t even know it had finally been released and Cory didn't know I had been looking for it.
3. Cory and Jamie also gave me the new Beatles biography for Christmas and this week I read a passage about Penny Lane (the actual street in Liverpool, not the song).
4. That same night, my cousin Zina sent me an e-mail telling me that one of the Cowsills died in New Orleans sometime during Hurricane Katrina and his body was found this week.
5. The next day, after reading the passage about Penny Lane, I came to work and as I watched the workers patch the roof, the song Penny Lane played on my satellite radio, which I had bought for myself for Christmas.

Penny Lane playing on the radio, as I watched the men work on the roof of Penny's house, after reading about Penny Lane the night before, was strange enough, but then I suddenly remembered Penny's fascination with the Cowsills. When I had received the e-mail the day before from my cousin, I hadn't thought of Penny. I was only thinking that it was another sad story from New Orleans.

Weird.

That Would Hurt

Three months after Hurricane Rita, someone is finally replacing the shingles on the roofs in my townhouse association. I haven't been able to park in my garage for a week because there are shingles and fork lifts and dumpsters in the driveway behind our townhomes. I can't complain though because a lot of people still have blue roofs.

I can, however, complain about the mess in my courtyard in the front of my house. I found tar paper and nails and shingles which had evidently fallen off the roof as the roofers worked. My main concern is that they'll drop something in the courtyard and break one of my glass tables.

Then I thought about what would happen if one of the roofers tried to stop the tar paper from falling off the roof. I pictured him sliding down the front of my townhouse, crashing through my glass top patio table and bleeding all over the patio.

It was a lot easier picking up all that trash than it would have been to get rid of a dead roofer with all that paperwork and everything. Not to mention having to clean up all that blood and the glass from the tabletop. Yeah, it's all good.

Angels, Evacuees and French Fries

The Friday before Christmas, my sister and I headed out to finish our shopping. The traffic around the mall is always bad. However, at Christmas, you can't leave home without a strategy. Our plan was to do all of our shopping in the stores that share a parking lot with Target. This would save us about thirty minutes (valuable nap time before going out that evening) by not trying to cross from one parking lot to another. The lunch part of our plan included Jack-In-The-Box.

However, much like Tim in New Orleans who cannot find a Popeye's since Hurricane Katrina, most of our Jack-In-The-Box restaurants in Beaumont are still closed because of Hurricane Rita. We soon found out that this was the case for the restaurant in the Target parking lot. As Bonnie and I passed the still closed restaurant, we spoke of one of the last times we ate there. It was the Saturday before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

I remember the day exactly because, as Bonnie and I sat there eating our lunch, several families walked into the restaurant. As the smaller children ran around and played, the older children spoke in more hushed tones but were still teasing each other and goofing around. The parents, however, had the unmistakable look of adults who are worried but don't want their children to know the extent of their concern.

Because of our love for New Orleans, we had been obsessively tracking Hurricane Katrina. I looked at Bonnie and said, "I bet those people are evacuating ahead of the hurricane." This was later confirmed when we looked at their cars in the parking lot. At this point, no one had any idea of what was yet to come for New Orleans and, a month later, for Beaumont. Yet, our hearts went out to them and I can still feel the sadness I felt for those poor people. I often wonder what happened to them and to their families and homes.

Little did I know that, three weeks later, we would also be evacuees. At one of our stops in Shreveport, after being on the road for a total of seventeen hours over two days, we stopped at Burger King. I know we had the same battle worn looks on our faces that we had seen on the faces of the New Orleans evacuees in Beaumont. All along the way, as we traveled through Louisiana and Arkansas, people were especially kind to us when they noticed our Texas license plates, toilet paper rolls peeking from behind pillows in our rear windows and the four dogs with their nine humans trying to make their way to safe harbor.

Although we encountered many angels on our two-week evacuation odyssey, the strangest angel story occurred in Shreveport. After we left Burger King, we stopped at a gas station to fuel up again. We were so shell shocked from trying to find gas earlier along our evacuation route that we became compulsive about filling our tanks if the gas meter needle fell below half a tank.

As I stood filling up my car, I noticed an odd old African American woman who was talking to herself and walking toward the gas station. She would wave at cars on the busy street as they passed and loudly speak to no one in particular. As she got close to me, I turned my head toward the gas pump because I wasn't sure what kind of crazy she was. When she got right up to me, she looked me in the eye and said, "Dry land." I looked back into her eyes and didn't see crazy. I saw love and concern and a light in her eyes behind the concern. She said again, "Dry land."

She then walked up to each of our cars and spoke to everyone in our group saying over and over again, "Dry land." "Don't you worry." "Everything is going to be okay." "Dry land, darlin's. Dry land."

She then continued on her journey down that busy street waving to cars and talking to no one in particular. We all looked at each other and got in our cars and drove away. When we discussed it later, we were unable to account for her ability to know we were all together or that we were concerned about the coming rains and floods on their way to our homes which were now so far to our south. If anyone had been at the station and had been watching us for a while, they could have easily discerned the nature of our trip and that we were all together. However, I knew that this lady had just walked into the station from far up the road because I had watched her as she was walking up.

When we got home, we found that her words had been oddly prophetic. Although, we didn't exactly come back to ideal living conditions and undamaged homes or dry land (my aunt had three feet of water in her Port Arthur home and the rain did a number on my sister's badly damaged townhouse), Beaumont only got about eight inches of rain from the hurricane. That's about the amount we get occasionally from a bad summer storm. Also, if Hurricane Rita had made a direct hit on southeast Texas instead of southwest Louisiana, my aunt would have had about fifteen feet of water in her house rather than three feet.

The strange lady in Shreveport with her dry land prediction still haunts my thoughts as do the faces of the New Orleans evacuees we saw at Jack-In-The-Box that long ago Saturday in August. I hope they're all okay. To all the nice people we met along the way in Arkansas and Louisiana, we're doing okay, too.

Welcome to the Sidebar

I've added a couple of people to my sidebar.

The first is Tim who is a friend of Sleepybomb of The Wreckroom. Tim is in New Orleans and has some amazing stories about everyday life in New Orleans right now in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The second is Pete Townshend of The Who fame. I learned about his blog from Sleepybomb also.

Reading Sleepybomb and Tim's blogs made me realize that all post-hurricane disaster zones have several things in common:

• Months (Katrina) and weeks (Rita) after the storms, there are still as many tarped blue roofs as there are roofs without tarps.
• Huge piles of debris still line all the roadways.
• Small plastic signs line the streets all over town advertising roofers, mold removal, carpenters and flooring companies ,but you still can't get anyone to come to your house and repair anything.
• Help wanted signs can be seen at almost all of the restaurants and most of the retail stores. (I can understand this in New Orleans but where is the Beaumont workforce?)
• There is horrible traffic everywhere because some of the traffic signals are still not functional.
• Where the street lights still haven't been repaired, it's amazingly dark even in the middle of the city. I can't imagine what it was like right after the storm.
• There are long lines at restaurants and most restaurants still aren't serving their full menu.
• We have all learned to appreciate the little things like door-to-door mail service, traffic signals and street lights, grocery stores and gas stations.

Daily Show and Hurricane Rita Videos

While we were evacuated for Hurricane Rita, there were thirteen of us at my brother's house with two televisions so I wasn't able to satisfy my addiction to watching the Daily Show, well, daily. After a week at my brother's house, we moved on to my son's house but he only has basic cable. I don't know where I went wrong with that boy.

I noticed on Vespa guy's blog that he had some links to a couple of videos of stories The Daily Show did about the hurricane and Beaumont.

Here are some more links to Daily Show videos.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

Wednesday Night Dreams

It was another boring night, dream-wise. I dreamed about hurricanes which isn't surprising at all and I'm certain hides no deep inner emotional conflict (although I'm sure Anonymous will disagree). The beginning of the night the dreams were centered around getting out of town but I don't specifically remember what the dreams were about or how they ended.

The end of the night, right before I woke up, the dreams were a bit more ominous as areas of my house which previously had no storm damage began to crumble (mostly ceilings) six weeks after the storm. In the dream, I wasn't particularly upset about it though.

I think the dreams are the result of still living in the wake of Hurricane Rita. The aftermath of the storm is still very much a part of our daily lives.

If you've just tuned in, this is the part where you analyze my dream...off you go.

Party Criteria

Last night I went to my sister's house for my 19 year-old nephew's belated birthday party (chicken and sausage gumbo!) which had been postponed due to Hurricane Rita. As usually happens, the children (age range 16 - 25) and grandparents (ages undetermined) went their separate ways around 9:00 p.m. and the middle generation had a party of our own.

We mostly swapped hurricane stories but, as always, the conversation turned to our upcoming trip to New Orleans in March. We half-heartedly threw around suggestions for alternate locations for the March trip because of possible problems since Hurricane Katrina. We spoke of New York City, Cancun, Las Vegas, Key West, Galveston, Austin and Houston and many others.

Each location had its attractive features and we would love to go to all or some of them as a group one day. However, the question that kept coming back up each time we spoke of a fun city to take our rowdy crowd was this: Can we drink in the street?

We're going to New Orleans.

Propane and Propane Accessories

When we evacuated for Hurricane Rita, there were nine humans and four dogs in a caravan of four vehicles. In my car, my traveling companions were Aunt Gladys, Aunt Hazel, Bandit and Prissy. Bandit and Prissy are dogs. Aunt Hazel and Aunt Gladys are humans of the aunt variety. At one point on our way back to Texas from Arkansas, after staying for a week with my brother’s family (five more humans and another dog), my Aunt Hazel, who was riding shotgun, suddenly said to no one in particular, “No one took baths. Everyone took showers.”

Aunt Gladys and I sat there for a while waiting for Aunt Hazel to elaborate on her cryptic revelation. When none was forthcoming, I looked over at Aunt Hazel and said, “And?”

She said, “I don’t know. I don’t even know why I thought of that, let alone said it out loud.”

Granted, we had been on the road for about six hours at that point and had another six hours or so of driving ahead of us. We were all delirious, not knowing the condition of our homes and all; but, it was still a strange thing to say. For the next hundred miles or so, every time it would get quiet, one of us would say, “No one took baths. Everyone took showers.” Then, we would laugh our asses off.

As an interesting side note, the whole time we were at my brother’s house, not only did no one take a bath, no one took a cold bath. I mean, no one took a cold shower. We were washing clothes and dishes constantly and with fourteen people in the house, someone was always bathing. Nevertheless, we always had hot water. My brother uses propane and propane accessories. I tell you what, Hank Hill would be proud.

I won’t even begin to speculate on the capacity of my brother’s septic tank. I still can’t believe we didn’t overflow that sucker with all the good Soccer Mom and Methodist Lady casseroles we were eating. There had to be some sort of divine intervention involved, like Jesus with the fishes or something. That must be it, a good old-fashioned Methodist/Catholic septic tank miracle. I wonder if Rome investigates holy septic tanks.

Four Words

Four words I hope we've heard the last of, at least until next summer...

catastrophic

devastation

hunker down

WILMA!!!!

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t care for the reporting on Fox News because of its, to put it mildly, sensationalistic tendencies when reporting the news. However, since I’ve recently become obsessed with hurricanes (and rightfully so I might add), I would rather see and hear the worst of the news I can get: ergo, Fox News.

As I was listening to Fox News coverage of Hurricane Wilma while I was getting ready for work this morning, the reporter who was standing outside in the battering winds in Coral-Something or Something-Coral, Florida, was asked by the reporters who were safely back in the studio if he thought he would get the storm surge that was predicted for the exact place he was standing. The reporter had been warned that he should have a boat ready and waiting nearby.

The reporter said, “No, I don’t have a boat. There are only 2 – 3 inches of water in the street. I don’t see any evidence of a surge.” Does he not know the meaning of the word surge? Honey, you ain't gonna see the surge until you're standing waist deep in Gulf of Mexico salt water at the intersection of First and Main.

This is the same reporter who had been standing in the eye of the hurricane twenty minutes earlier saying that he thought the worst of the storm was over. This guy might know all about Iraq and Iran but he sure don’t know nothin’ 'bout no hurricanes.

We Needed the Funk

Last night was my first outing to Crockett Street since Hurricane Rita and who better to be playing than our favorite funky band out of Baton Rouge Jive Train. Tonight back out on Crockett Street, it's the Astros on a big screen television in the street, Vallejo at Antones and Wang Chi's favorite soon-to-be-famous local band 9 Station Drive at Star Bar.

Ah, I'm finally starting to feel normal.

The saxophone player read a limerick from the stage that someone wrote but I didn't catch who wrote it. I'm paraphrasing because I also don't exactly remember the limerick. If anyone knows who wrote the limerick, I will gladly give them credit.

There once was a bitch storm named Rita
Which couldn't have been any meaner
Now I'm back home
And all my shit's gone
And I keep getting fucked by FEMA.

Food for Thought: After the Storm

The above picture is off of a site that has some great video of Hurricane Rita hitting Beaumont.

Also, I don't know how many Beaumont area people read this blog but I have some things I've been thinking about and want to share.

• A lot of coverage has been given to the fine work done by the emergency workers and people who are restoring electricity to the area but everyone also needs to remember the guys who have been working restoring telephone and cable service as well as those clearing the streets of debris and garbage.
• The trees aren't finished falling. I haven't heard anyone on the local news channels mention this. If we get a good stiff breeze with a cold front, shit is going to start falling from the trees that are still standing and I'm not talking about acorns and bird crap. I'm talking about huge ass limbs that are broken high up in the trees and haven't yet made it to the ground. Heads up everyone.
• I just heard on the evening news that the burn ban has been lifted in Hardin County for this weekend so people can get rid of some of the debris in their yards. The burn ban has been implemented because it is dangerously dry from, if you can believe it, a lack of rain. Keep in mind that all of the trees that were downed during the hurricane three weeks ago are now pretty much kindling. Does anyone else see disaster written all over this lifting of the burn ban?
• Premonitions? A month or so before the hurricane, I told my family that if we were to get hit by a hurricane or an ice storm, we would be in big trouble because of the trees that were growing all around the high wires. We still have areas of the city weeks away from having power restored because of fallen trees. The week before the hurricane hit, I suddenly and inexplicably got tired of the Dilbert paraphernalia I had all over my office which I had been collecting for about ten years and brought it all home. This made it a lot easier to pack up my office in preparation for the storm which hit a week later. I sure hope I'm not having another premonition here with regard to the lifting of the burn ban.

You Know You Live on the Gulf Coast When...

(I got these by e-mail today.)

• You have FEMA's number on your speed dialer.
• You have more than 300 C and D batteries in your kitchen drawer.
• Your pantry contains more than 20 cans of Spaghetti Os.
• You are thinking of repainting your house to match the plywood covering your windows.
• When describing your house to a prospective buyer, you say it has three bedrooms, two baths and one safe hallway.
• Your SSN isn't a secret, it's written in Sharpie on your arms.
• You are on a first-name basis with the cashier at Home Depot.
• You are delighted to pay $3 for a gallon of regular unleaded.
• The road leading to your house has been declared a No-Wake Zone.
• You decide that your patio furniture looks better on the bottom of the pool.
• You own more than three large coolers.
• You can wish that other people get hit by a hurricane and not feel the least bit guilty about it.
• You rationalize helping a friend board up by thinking "It'll only take gallon of gas to get there and back".
• You have 2-liter coke bottles and milk jugs filled with water in your freezer.
• Three months ago you couldn't hang a shower curtain; today you can assemble a portable generator by candlelight.
• You catch a 13-pound redfish. In your driveway.
• You can recite from memory whole portions of your homeowner's insurance policy.
• You consider a "vacation" to stunning Tupelo, Mississippi.
• At cocktail parties, women are attracted to the guy with the biggest chainsaw.
• You have had tuna fish more than 5 days in a row.
• There is a roll of tar paper in your garage.
• You can rattle off the names of three or more meteorologists who work at the Weather channel.
• Someone comes to your door to tell you they found your roof.
• Ice is a valid topic of conversation.
• Your "drive-thru" meal consists of MREs and bottled water.
• Relocating to South Dakota does not seem like such a crazy idea.
• You've been laughed at over the phone by a roofer, fence builder or a tree worker.
• A battery powered TV is considered a home entertainment center.
• You don't worry about relatives wanting to visit during the summer.
• Having a tree in your living room does not necessarily mean it's Christmas.
• Toilet paper is elevated to coin of the realm at the shelters.
• You know the difference between the "good side" of a storm and the "bad side."
• Your kids start school in August and finish in July.
• You go to work early and stay late just to enjoy the air conditioning.