Not quite home sweet home

Well, over the last week we've now stayed at three different houses waiting for power to come back on to our house after Ike (big thanks to Elizabeth, Kami, and Lisa for taking us Ike evacuees in!). Jack enjoyed playing with his buddy Ryan (and of course, Ryan's toys) for a few days. We're slowly making progress back towards the homestead in Houston after spending over a week in Austin. Unfortunately our house remains in one of the few sections in our neighborhood that doesn't have power, so we're not back to home sweet home just yet and instead are staying in a different section with friends who do have power. At least we're back in the same zip code now! Reminds me of the phrase "baby steps" from the movie "What About Bob?"

Got to survey the damage first hand today and we were incredibly fortunate not to have more damage to our house after seeing some of our neighbor's roofs. A number of people had bright blue tarps stretched over their houses after large panels of shingles were blown off, along with large dumpsters in front of their houses with ruined carpet piled inside. We had maybe 8-10 shingles off one of the ridge lines in our roof and a piece of hardiplank siding down, but that was it.

We missed the worse of everything, including the very long gas lines about a week ago just after Ike struck. The grocery stores now appear to be back to normal for the most part, for us it's just waiting until our power comes back on to be able to re-stock the refrigerator. I'm looking forward to that as eating out has really gotten old lately, though we enjoyed getting to go to our favorite Austin restaurants while we were away (can we get Kerbey Lane and/or The Salt Lick in Houston anytime soon people?)

So at least we've got one more evening of air-conditioned, internet-connected bliss. Hopefully that will buy us enough time to get power back to our own house tomorrow, but after seeing how much worse a lot of other Houstonians have things, we're not going to complain if it's not on.