26 October 2008

The Calm after the Storm

I know I haven't written in a while. I want to take this opportunity to blame the weather.

Apparently, a few weeks ago, we had a thunderstorm roll through town. (Hint: They named it "Ike".) It was fun. Kinda.

I told quite a few people that, as with the previous big storm, "Evacuation is the coward's way out." Normally, I can say things like that with impunity because no one ever listens to me. On this occasion, several people decided to hang out on the shores of Galveston Island to "watch the storm blow in".

I would like to take a moment of silence to honor those who died taking my advice.

So anyway, I stayed home. I kinda had nowhere to go. I mean, I could have gone to stay with my grandmother, but a) even a little stress makes me throw up, and b) my grandmother lives closer to the water than I do. Besides, someone had to watch the house, and my roommates all bailed.

The cowards. (See? I can't stop!)

Anyway, it was fun. At first. I spent the day watching Scrubs reruns and drinking hot tea sweetened with honey. That's my latest thing... tea sweetened with honey.

The wind started picking up sometime after nightfall. But it wasn't really that windy yet. I went to bed, eventually, and slept really well. For a while.

I awoke to the sound of water dripping three inches from my ear. I thought, "I should get up before I get wet." I stood up and found that I was already soaked.

So I relocated to the living room couch. This is a special piece of furniture. It consists of a solid wood frame (kinda pretty) and cushions consisting of hard foam covered in cloth. They're comfortable to most people, but I'm about 100 pounds overweight. I think the purpose of this furniture is to keep me in one spot... the truly soft, comfortable chair (actually a chaise) in the room. So they can keep an eye on me.

I slept on the couch as long as I could. So after about four minutes, I relocated. I had two dogs to deal with, and they weren't liking the storm at all. So I let them climb onto the the chaise with me. That must have lasted at least thirty seconds. One of the dogs, a smallish Australian Shepherd nick-named "Satan", wouldn't stop trying to gouge out my eyes with her two-inch-long claws. So I moved her kennel to a spot beside the chaise and put her back in it. Buddy stayed with me. He definitely didn't like the storm.

In the morning, the power was out. I took some choice photographs of the carnage, which I later found out would be used for insurance purposes. Our house (I like to call it that, even though I'm only here temporarily) was relatively undamaged. We had a tree in our back yard that hadn't been there the night before, though.



My roommates came home that day, and began the long process of calling insurance companies, always a great way to spend a weekend. I was trying to figure out what people did with their time before Al Gore invented the Internet.

Then came the fun part. Emptying out the refrigerator. Since we had no power, we had to take everything out and cook it. And eat it. That wasn't entirely fun. I can only eat a small amount before my stomach complains that I'm not letting it sleep.

While my roommie Anna was cleaning out the freezer, she pulled out a container of some type that seemed to contain a prop from a Geiger movie. She said, "Awwwww, now I have to throw this out!"

I said, "What is it?"

"It's a horse's foot."

"Question: Why do you have a horse's foot in the freezer?"

"So I can show it to people."

Wow. So, as it turns out, Anna is a part-time ferrier, which means that she's basically a pedicurist for horses. She had a frozen foot to show people what can go wrong when the horse's feet aren't cared for. I mean, we're talking about animals weighing as much as a ton, so this is actually very important. Still..... the freezer?

So, anyway, my roommates left again. This time, to go stay with family. They took all the non-preishable food with them, which was fine with me, because I didn't feel like eating anyway.

I couldn't go back to work, because the power was off all over town, including my office, so I stayed home and cleaned. As much as I could clean, that is. We were told by the insurance companynot to do much cleaning, so they could witness the damage. I also got to spend quality time with Buddy. And Naga, my snake. She, too, was driven insane by the storm. But while I moved her "house" from my soaked bedroom into the dining room, she got to spend a little time stretching her muscles.

Eventually, the roads were opened, and I went to visit Jean and Al. Their house was untouched, but about half their fence was gone. And they, too, had a new tree. And no power. Anna was telling me about a few days after she cleaned her fridge. She had detected a smell. She was thinking she must have missed something, so she was looking in all the nooks and crannies.

"It turned out to be the Bobcat," she concluded.

"You... had a bobcat in your freezer?"

"Yeah, why?"

I said, "Question..."