email to my sister

Sis:

Thanks for the email. I have listed the numbers you asked for at the bottom.

We are staying here. We are actually helping with a Red Cross shelter at our church tomorrow from 2 – 6, which should be about the time the rains move in here. We had T* and her kids and dogs last night as they drove from their house for over 5 hours to get here (that is normally a 50 minute trip). They are on their way to relatives farther north, but that was all the driving that they could take by that point. Now they have finally moved on, except we kept one of their dogs, Tex, who is 16 years old now. We all know him from camping, and where they are going he would have to stay in the hot garage because he would not be allowed into the house. It took us all morning to figure out how to refill T*’s SUV with gas, since no gas stations around here have any more gas. FirstBorn (such a smart girl) came up with the solution (she is in College Town of course): Hubby managed to siphon the gas from our boat into T*’s car! Now we are doing yard clean up to make less dead-branch missiles available to fly at our windows. They are not expecting it to flood where we are, but they are expecting hurricane force winds here of 75 mph. Our area is under voluntary evacuation and roughly half have left. The biggest reason to leave is the probable loss of electricity. If that happens, then after the storm dies down we will definitely be bringing dogs, cats, and kids to your area. I don’t think we would last very long without air conditioning in this 100+ degree weather! But for now, there does not seem to be any immediate reason to join all those other folks on the parking lot formerly known around here as the highway. That is the biggest negative result of Rita so far: people are running out of gas and overheating their cars as they sit and crawl along ALL of the roads away from Houston. It is really awful. Our gas tanks are all full, so if the traffic ever dies down after the storm, we can get to Dallas without buying more gas. At the rate the roads are moving now, we could get stuck on the road with no way to buy gas and ride out the storm in our car with all those other poor people!

Love you lots,
13D