Yup. But, he talked back to me like I was being hysterical so, I just wished him good luck and quit talking to him.
" I felt like I was stealing cookies from the cookie jar."
Me too.
Hey, blam! I haven't been on these Rita threads...still playing catch-up on work delayed during the Katrina outages.
How did you come through? I know the west side of the bay got smacked hard. Is your place OK? Dogs OK?
I had a 15-foot-deep pile of trees/branches in my yard...but none hit the house. Some shingles blew off, but all in all, the house came through fine. No power for 7 days, but again, we couldn't complain while watching the horror in N.O. With the gas shortage, I shut down my generator and went to say with my niece's family---taking my gas cans with me. We used every last drop and then sat in a gas line for 4 1/2 hours on Friday.
Best purchase: a window air conditioner. Our routine was to start working on yard clean up around 8am, work til dark around 7pm. We got one channel where we could watch news at night---it was almost too depressing to watch. At around 10pm we unplugged the fridge and fired up the A/C. Had to all sleep on the floor in the den, but, hey!, it was cool!
Most interesting experience:
During the ferocious back side of the storm I was sitting near a large window. Every once in a while I heard children's sing-song voices. At first I was astonished to think the children next door were out in the storm, but I looked and they weren't out. This kept happening...little snippets of children's voices. Then, with sustained winds of about 100mph, I heard a piano playing and a group of adults & children singing "What a Friend I have in Jesus"! I have no idea where they were. We suspect the wind was picking up sound waves and dropping them at random. Ever heard of such a thing? It was a first for me.