We're all fine. No house damage, modest leaks (e.g., one windowpane needs better caulking). The back fence was blown over. That will need to be rebuilt. During the hurricane, power bounced up and down from 2:00am - 3:30am then went out for good and hasn't come back yet. We've eaten up most of the perishable food and are now staring at canned tuna, canned ravioli, etc. We have low-pressure water. Flush the toilet and it fills in ten minutes. You can take a shower, but it's a drizzle (or, it's a standard California low-flow useless shower). We have natural gas. We've been doing all the cooking on the gas grill outside to attempt to not overheat the inside of the house. Our hardwired phone has been up non-stop, save for a brief mid-afternoon outage. Cell phone service has sucked. AT&T's 3G crapped out completely. AT&T's normal GSM/EDGE service has been unreliable. You'll have a signal for one minute and then "no service" for two. Very, very frustrating.

Rice University, on the other hand, has Internet, power, and air conditioning, but no water pressure. I'm sitting in my office typing this. My office smelled damp and mildew-ish, mainly due to a bunch of water that leaked in through a balcony door around the corner. The building also has the distinct odor of urine, probably from the lack of working toilets plus all the grad students who decided to say "screw it" and crash out here rather than in their homes. (Can't say I blame them.)

So, riddle it out. You can sit comfortably at work, but you've got to go home to poop. Sure, sign me up. My wife and daughter are downstairs, in my wife's office. We're plugging our kid into a DVD. Air conditioning never felt so nice.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get all my disaster photos onto the web. I wandered around for hours yesterday taking pictures. Some amazing stuff. More on that when they're live.

Our campus honcos, for reasons that defy sanity, have decided (so far) that class starts on Tuesday. That's almost reasonable, given that the campus itself seems to be functional. The city around us, however, is quite dysfunctional. No restaurants open. Only a handful of supermarkets open. No daycare. Houston public schools are closed for the whole week. Many professors live further out, or closer to the coast, and may well have significant home damage to deal with. And they're supposed to come back on Tuesday and teach calculus? Madness.

Power is slowly coming back to the city. One friend a few miles away has power. We haven't yet decided whether to stick around and, umm, teach classes on Tuesday, or to say hell with it and drive to Dallas. We've got a full tank of gas in the Acura, which can easily get to Dallas without refilling. Right now, we're going around in the Audi, which has convenient AWD. Once that's empty, we're not doing any more driving.