Batten down the hatches

Here come the evacuees...or not. Welcome to the roller coaster that has been the last four days.

A group of my extended family consisting of one grandmother (we call her "Sweetmama," and that pretty much tells you all you need to know), one aunt, four cousins, their four kids, five dogs, seven cats, and a big loud white bird all loaded up into cars and started driving this way.

Fourteen hours later, they had traveled fifty miles and were almost out of gas. So they turned around. Sweetmama said something about preferring to go back and drown rather than keep sitting on the freeway going nowhere, which at the time almost sent my mother into hysterics. I hope we all live long enough for that to become a family joke.

So, lacking other options, they went home. They're all gathering at somebody else's house, which is too long a story for a blog and not interesting anyway, and they are presumably trying to find hatches to batten down. As of Friday afternoon, it's only a category three storm, which means that they'll only lose power for a couple of weeks, and hopefully only have to replace the carpets.

We're hosting a big group of evacuees from a church in League City, and of course there are still New Orleansites (or whatever they call themselves) by the thousand.