Rita

What an experience Rita has been. I guess you could say it all started on Wednesday when at the end of the school day our principal announced that there would not be school on Thursday (or Friday, but Friday was supposed to be a holiday for us anyways). We were told to unplug all our computers and put things away in our classrooms in case Rita did hit. When I left school, I went to HEB and the line to get gas was out of control. Luckily I had close to a full tank, so I didn't need any. I went in the store and I started freaking out. Up to this point, I wasn't that worried about the hurricane, but seeing the empty shelves was a little too disturbing. Seriously, I'm not exaggerating, almost all the shelves were empty. They did have plenty of frozen goods, but as far as canned goods, bread and water, it was ALL gone. After going to HEB, I went across the street to Kroger and they did have a few more things, but once again, it was pretty bare.

James and I wanted to stay at home, but my mom wanted to leave and she was in Denver and we needed to have the house ready to go when she got home. At that point we still thought we'd see her before we left. We packed up the house as best we could. We took everything off the walls, took pictures of the whole house, gathered all the photo albums and packed them in my car. Thursday we left around 12 and headed to Temple. My mom had landed at Bush which is about 25-30 minutes from our house at 11 and she didn't get to the house until 2 or 2:30. James and I managed to leave just as they opened the southbound lanes of I-45 to go north. It only took us 6.5 hours to get to Temple, a trip that normally takes 2.5 hours (it took my mom 10 hours to get from the house to Temple). During the 45 minutes that we were on I-45, James and I entertained ourselves by taking pictures of the people on the side of the road and all the cars that were on the freeway. We saw people driving with car doors open, people pushing their cars (and they were moving with the rest of the traffic), people walking dogs, peeing on the side of the road, and people having picnics in the median of the freeway. Let me just say that the pictures that they showed on TV were real, I couldn't believe that there were really that many cars on the road like that. I didn't believe what I was seeing until I was actually out there in the mess of all the people.

We came home on Saturday after talking to some friends who said we had power and that our house was basically okay. When we did get home we found out that two sides of our fence had fallen and one of them was just inches from hitting a window and knocking it out. We also had a number of shingles on the ground in the back, so we should be getting a new roof now.

Well, I guess all that I can really say it that our area was extremely lucky. I know that other areas were not as fortunate as we were, but I can't help but be so thankful that we did not have more damage than we did.

I hope you all had a good weekend. Blessings.