Status update:

We've managed to have working telephony the whole time. This is good and bad. Good because you can call out to people with Internet and ask them to figure stuff out for you. My wife's parents are giving us updates from the power restoration maps put out by CenterPoint Energy. My dad's doing assorted other odd jobs for me (e.g., download instructions for reassembling our swingset, which I partly took apart prior to the storm). The bad part of working phones is that everybody is calling you. All the time. And they want to have long, cathartic conversations when you're trying to fix lunch.

We had low water pressure up until this morning. The official word was "we don't think it's contaminated, but boil it anyway if you're going to drink it." This morning, the water pressure came back. Ahh, beautiful hot shower. Also this morning, the weather was just stunning, with a cool breeze. We opened all the windows and aired out the house.

Electricity: one of our friends got it back yesterday afternoon, so we went over for dinner. Very nice. Driving home, after dark, is really a trick. On one hand, you're looking left and right to see who's got power and who doesn't. It's on a block-by-block basis. The media is saying 25% of us have power, but that wasn't consistent with my drive home last night, where I'd say it was more like 10%. They've hooked up several of the larger condo buildings, but all but a handful of houses are dark. (My understanding is that they're going for a strategy of maximizing their bang for the buck. If you can plug in one building and get a hundred people up, then that's high priority.) We, meanwhile, continue to have zero power.

Today, we ate the absolute last of our perishables (quesadillas with room-temperature cheese and previously-cooked bacon, cooked over our gas grill). Our fridge is now completely empty and anything from here on out is either non-perishables from the pantry, or the handful of mangos and bananas that we've got left. (I bought green bananas before this all started. They're now yellow/brown.)

Meanwhile, at Rice, they got the water pressure back on today. Still, daycare and other schools aren't necessarily ready. Our daughter's daycare won't be open until Thursday, minimum. I may end up teaching class tomorrow with my daughter in a corner. I hope I can keep her distracted enough to maintain a meaningful discussion with the students. No way I'm going to do "real" material. We'll talk more about disasters and I'll see if I can get any of the campus honchos to come give a talk.

lectric: I still want to get you out here at some point. I think I want to put together a panel discussion with emergency management people, to talk about how everybody recovers from and deals with all this crap. I wish I had more detail about exactly what's up with the power. Given the large number of mature trees in my neighborhood, and with all the wires on telephone poles, it's highly likely that a tree took out our power. A neighbor across the street says she saw a transformer behind her house fall off its pole. Still, there's a shiny new, still under construction, office building two blocks from our house, and all of its lights are on.

drakino: I'm very happy we don't live in Galveston. Those satellite photos are staggering. I still can't believe that some of those people were seriously planning to "ride out" the storm. Not like that you don't.