Making it Through Isaac

Thank you internet gods for delivering yourself back to me! I have internet access for the first time in 24 hours and you'd swear that I've gone months without it. Sad really. So I'm blogging now just to blog. We're at my sister's boyfriend's house right now who I think may be one of the only people left in the city with power and internet and cable. There are currently 700,000 people without power right now in Louisiana and we were one of them. It actually really wasn't bad being without power. As long as you stayed still it wasn't too hot, I got to read Shadow Show, the new tribute to Ray Bradbury anthology by candlelight and it was all rather peaceful and a bit moody in a good way. I suspect Shadow Show will be for me what Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest was for Hurricane Gustav. I will always associate Four and Twenty Blackbirds with Hurricane Gustav and listening to the winds howl.

So my wonderful job mandated that I come into work yesterday. I work for a psychiatric hospital that planned on closing admissions at 7, yet they insisted that I come down from the northshore, where I would be safer, and instead stay on the southshore, leaving Matt by himself for his first hurricane. I had to be at work for a whole four hours yesterday before I was sent driving home in tropical storm conditions  and today it was out of the question to drive into work. And now I don't know when I'll be able to make it back home to Matt and to the northshore because they're expecting major flooding on the northshore due to the lake overflowing. I THINK that we'll be fine as we're about 2 miles from the lake and our apartment is a little bit raised. As of my last check, the apartment seems to be fine aside from some manmade issues >>

This storm certainly hasn't been the worst I've seen as far as hurricanes go. We've especially been reminded of this as today is the anniversary of Katrina, August 29th of 2005. The winds have probably gotten up to about gusts of around 70 miles per hour here and we've had some street flooding. The main issue  has been that the thing has not MOVED. It came on shore about 24 hours ago, and it really has not moved much at all. While 70 mile per hour winds aren't unheard of, when you're getting them for 24 hours straight, they start to do some damage. Luckily, our damage has been minimal, but we've seen others with gutters, whole trees down, and some cities closer to the shore have gotten some really severe damage with levee toppings and bad house flooding. The street flooding has been pretty bad too because the storm is just sitting here and dumping rain and rain and more rain.  And of course there are the power outages everywhere and they're not expecting power to come back on until Saturday. I may be working tomorrow, I may not..no clue what's going on with that. Would love to know when I can get back home, but that's the worst part of these things...all of the uncertainty and unknowing.

So what have I been doing to pass the time? Not a whole lot of anything. I've mostly been reading. And laying down. And trying not to move because you get really sweaty and nasty if you do. And then sleeping every now and then. It really is kind of amazing just to be connected again. It made me smile a few times that I would snap pictures and think "I need to show this to my FRIENDS" and of course be thinking of many of you. All of these pictures are just from my moms house. My mom got it pretty easy considering. There are lots of other houses that are going to have much more cleanup than what we will have. May be back later with a review of Shadow Show! We'll see how the night goes...