Tigerrepellant Needs A Boat

Hurricane Rita has added a lot of excitement to this household. Early last night, we were all thinking we would just hunker down in our apartment and wait out the storm...high winds and all. Then, as we watched the news, they told us the storm grew to a massive category 5 hurricane (175 mph winds, 215 mph gusts). We are about an hour inland, and they weather guys predicted that even we would have sustained winds of between 100 and 120 mph. Talk about freaky! We decided to sleep on it and figure out our plans early this morning.

I really wanted to stay for a few reasons.

1) I actually wanted to experience a storm of that magnitude. One of the weathermen actually said that if there was such a thing as a category 6 hurricane, Rita would be one. I don't know...call me crazy. Maybe it's because I always wanted to be a storm chaser.

2) I just wanted to stay there to keep an eye on all of my stuff. Call me materialistic if you must. I won't agree with you. I really value my books and my movie collection. I'd hate to leave and come back to nothing.

So, this morning we decided that it wasn't worth the risk to stay in our little apartment with 100 mph sustained winds. We packed up what we wanted to take with us and booked it to the freeway. The booking stopped there. To make this story nice and short, we went no more than 2 miles in almost 3 hours. 3 HOURS!!! And in a standard car no less. We finally heard that Rita had decided to turn more to the east of us. Yippee! Not so much of a threat anymore. So we got off of the freeway and headed back home. And here we will stay until Rita is finished with us.

I don't know if you have seen the pictures of the traffic on the freeways down here, but it is crazy! I've never seen a mass exodus like this in my entire life. It is unreal! It is just like the scenes in Deep Impact, Independence Day and all of the other end-of-the-world movies. You would think that a comet is hurtling toward the city of Houston as we speak. You really have to see it.

Anyway, so far so good. I'll keep you posted with further developments as I am able. I'm hoping we won't lose any power. With the 100-degree heat down here, that could be bad.