Small Town Girl Appears...

This morning I was going to Starbucks and this lady was sitting in the turning lane with her blinker on, so I thought she was going to just turn in the parking lot. So I swung in and got in the line for drive-through. Turns out, I kinda cut her off. Now, since I live in this big city of no manners, I could have just said "whatever, maybe if she didn't drive the hugest Infiniti SUV she could have made it.." but I felt bad so I paid for her coffee.As of this morning, my zip is 36% out. Jimmy & Donald, as well as Carl who lives up 290 a bit, all got power yesterday. They say "Major Lines" are due to be finished by today, which will bring most people up. Otherwise, they project over 80% up by Sunday. Now, I ask, if they are so excited about this 75%, how is 80% any better? I mean it is but it doesn't sound like it would be that much.

More bowling pics!
Jimmy and I had a REALLY good time!!

Weekend Plans:
Of course it all depends on the lovely people at Centerpoint, but we may go see a movie or 2. I just want to go grocery shopping. I have ZERO food in my house now. I haven't been to a grocery store in 2 weeks! I miss looking at the produce and carefully planning my weekly menu. If we get the power back, it will mean mass amounts of cooking for me! Cookies, slow cooker, etc. I just want to be home! I will actually enjoy cleaning my house and getting it back to normal and doing laundry and just... living.

Are we done yet?

Dear Houston / Centerpoint Energy / whomever the hell cares...

I live in a lovely neighborhood on the Northwest side of Houston called Oak Forest. We have a few lovely parks, trails around the bayous, and quaint Ranch house's via the 1940-1950's. We still, after the storm, have beautiful trees all around.
Although our area is so pretty and well known, we seem to have been forgotten. While Centerpoint puts our zip code in the "By Monday" list, we continue to go without power. After we are updated to the "By Thursday" list, things don't look like they are going our way. I find it extremely hard to believe that only 22% of our fair city is without power when your maps clearly shows you have 50% of the metro area alone to work on.
I went by my lonely house today to get mail and clothing, and water my pretty begonias. Not one spec of tree branch or twigs has been removed from our streets/curbs. Every house is dark. My neighbor was taking a nap in his driveway on a lawn chair so that he could stay cool.
I would like to know how the 2nd largest neighborhood has been left behind. I would like to know how our projected date is today, yet for the past 3 days, we continue to have 44% of our zip code down (per your "estimate.")
Please remember we exist. My neighbor across the street is on oxygen and shouldn't be in this heat. We are all rallying to help by cooking and running extension cords to generators (except one guy, but we won't deal with that just yet) but that doesn't change how warm it is.
I do realize that an enormous storm came through our fair city. I do realize that Galveston needs a lot of help. But... you sent all your extra crews home before the job was finished. This doesn't make me feel like you are making progress, this makes me feel like you have lost the momentum.
We all want this even to be behind us. While there will be months of rebuilding, the first step would be getting everyone back up with power so we are well rested and efficient.

If you won't turn my power back on, then please, just update your map to a realistic date so we can stop getting our hopes up and just be surprised when the power is on before October.

Thank you.

It's that time of year!

I believe I should start my birthday list! I want some different things than usual this year so I want to go ahead and put it out there.
#1 - I really really want some latte bowls in fiesta type colors (and white). I hear that they come in multiple sizes and I think cereal and maybe a few larger (think pasta!) would be nice. Maybe even one mixing size?#2 - an iPhone? but that means I have to switch carriers. I want the Blackberry Bold BADLY but i would settle for the curve. Not sure this is really a birthday item...#3 - A Le Creuset Dutch Oven!!!! A nice big one. Don't really care what color (i guess red b/c most of my other stuff is red like my kitchenaid).

#4 - Gift cards I guess? Victoria's Secret (I am in love with their very light and lacy undies. they feel like you are wearing nothing and make you feel pretty :) ) Williams Sonoma!! Crate N Barrel! You know me... cooking knick knacks.

#5 - All my friends together for dinner and wine. :)


Update: Still now power! We are comfy and cozy at Lee's parents house. Hopefully soon, it will be nice to get into our own bed again. *sigh*

How Many Posts in ONE DAY?

What is this, 3? 4?

This came along and I wanted to share. Made me laugh.

Top Ten Reasons Hurricane Season Is Like Christmas

Number Ten: Decorating the house (with plywood).

Number Nine: Dragging out boxes that haven't been used since last season.

Number Eight: Last minute shopping in crowded stores.

Number Seven: Regular TV shows pre-empted for 'Specials'.

Number Six: Family coming to stay with you.

Number Five: Family and friends from out of state calling you.

Number Four: Buying food you don't normally buy . . . and in large quantities.

Number Three: Days off from work.

Number Two: Candles.

Number One reason Hurricane Season is like Christmas:

At some point you're probably going to have a tree in your house!

Trendy!

Oh yes, and my toes are painted a very trendy dark purple. (please excuse the chipping!)

3 Things...

To add to this lovely post-natural-disaster week, I had a first. Yesterday on the way over to feed our friend's cat, I got into my first car accident. Due to all red lights being 4-way stops (and most city people don't get it..) I went to turn left and someone wanted to go straight and hit my right front fender. Now, at the time, I was a little freaked. My legs were shaking and I was just in a daze. The damage is stupid. Even in pictures it doesn't really show up. Remember the VW commercials where they are driving along and someone creams them and they go "OH Sh**"? That is kinda how this was.You can kinda tell that piece is popped out a little.
Same here. Barely a scrape. I mean, we were going about 15mph so it isn't like I was t-boned or anything. Still, sucked.

This afternoon I was sitting around Jen and Dave's while they went out for lunch for her birthday and Lee went to watch football (long sentence!) aaaand the puppies all took a nice siesta. I used this time to do laundry, eat lunch, and read 3/4 of cjane's blog archives. Anyway, here is what I observed...Lola on top of like 3 pillows. Snug as a bug.My Mr. Ted, loves ottomans.
Tashi, soaking up some sunshine.
Don't you adore the way puppies smell when they have been sleeping? Like corn chips. And the little stretch and yawn that says "That is exactly what I needed! I shall repeat that in about 45 minutes..."
Ok last photo. This was Friday, heading out to daycare to escape the hot house.

My pups = love.

You can find me...

At Target at Lunch-Time (which tends to be like 10:55am around my office... we are all food obsessed)...
Buying what?
THIS!
On Blue-Ray DVD! WOOO!
I need to throw a viewing party one night soon...

In other news, although we are short on green paper, i really want to lobby for a new MacBook. Only the left side of the mouse-pad-clicker works on the 5 year old ibook. This is a problem when you are right handed...

Still no power. I call my house every hour to see if the answering machine works.
No Bueno.

You can find me...

At Target at Lunch-Time (which tends to be like 10:55am around my office... we are all food obsessed)...
Buying what?
THIS!

The weekend is HERE.

Ok enough Hurricane drama.
For now.
I have read each and every single blog entry that Nie Nie has ever done. I even checked out the food blog she was trying out. Makes me want to be that happy. She is just a pure person with not a stitch of anger or sarcastic in her body.
I am the most sarcastic person in the world.
I have very bad thoughts at work about co-workers. Mainly at their expense, not so much about doing bad things to them.
But, like Nie...
I absolutely, 110%, LOVE my husband. I think about him all day. I wait in angst for him to arrive home from work each day. I don't like spending time away. He's my buddy!
Although not "human," I LOVE my kiddos. They may be dogs and a kitty, but I love them like it's a crime. I take massive amounts of photos of them. What did we do before camera phones? I have caught some priceless moments with that thing.
We have a good life, that is for sure. Yeah, right now things are tough. The economy is beginning to affects us a bit. Our house didn't apraise for what we hoped. We are doing to be stuck in some ugly debt for a little while b/c of my kick-ass kitchen.
Worth it?
Absolutely.
Lee isn't doing as wonderful at work as usual. His fault? Not at all. Every year they mess him around and he has to start all over. This year... nothing is happening for him. This is bad when you get accustomed to him knocking it out of the park. Scaling back is mucho harder than spending more.
And man i really want the new Pumpkin Spice soap and cleaning stuff at Williams Sonoma. I would buy some, but... they still don't have power either.
So we are going to check out the finances over the next month and try and see what we can do.
Thinks are tiring right now. Hurricane. Family death. Economic issues. Job issue.
But.
I love this man and I know that because of this, we will make it through.
And still be smiling.

ok fine. a small update. Our nieghbor talked to our other neighbor that works for Centerpoint and yes, we will be on BY Monday. Electricity is all everyone talks about. It is like an obsession or a drug.
"You got power?"
"Yep."
"Maaaaaaaaaan. Must be nice."

We will be ok. Things have a way of working out when they should. We have noticed that.
thank you, generator, for letting me blog! I missed it!

Some updates...

It has been almost a full week since the storm hit. We are still without power, but we are making it ok. Slowly our city is churning back to life. Here is a light timeline on how things have been progressing:

Saturday:

The worst of the storm hit us around 3am. We woke up at 1:30 and turned on the tv but the cable was already out. After some really strong wind gusts we got up and went to the hall. We put Lilly in our large mesh dog crate (we didn't want to cram her in this tiny cat crate) and we drug the dog bed and several blankets and pillows. We had a wind up radio and a lantern type light that both were turned on all night long. My phone let me watch the dopplar radar until around 5:30am or so before that got too slow. During the really really bad part (4ish?) our front windows were vibrating like they were about to break. It was at this point that I started to feel sick (someone told me later they think it was the really low pressure). We lost power at 2:45am. At 6:30 the winds didn't seem as bad so we gathered up the pets and went to bed. I slept about 2 hours and then we got up to survey the house. Thank goodness, we have no damage. Our tree is pretty light now, but we lost zero windows and our roof is fine.
Later on that morning, Donald and Jimmy came over and we all talked about our experience. Lee pulled the big branches up to the curb and I took a short nap around 2pm. Napping is hard when you own Schnauzers. They bark out the window at EVERYTHING. And since so many people were outside milling around, they had lots of people to tell off. Saturday nightw was terrible. It was so hot and muggy and we could barely sleep.

Sunday:

Donald and Jimmy came back over and we all started charging our cell phones in the car. Jimmy was so full of pent up energy that he raked our front yard! I swept the porch and cleaned up my flower box. Donald and I walked the dogs to the Bayou to see how full it was. It rained cats and dogs Sunday morning (the last thing everyone needed that had trees in thier roofs...). Later on Donald and I hopped in the car and drove around to find a grocery store that didn't have a line wrapped around it. HEB had a short line and they were letting people in, but they didn't have power and therefor all perishables were NADA. But we got some cookies and bread and such.
I am sick of grilled food!

Monday I went back to work and took all our frozen meats with me! It was so nice to have A/C and INTERNET!! Monday night my cousins drove down from Palestine with a Generator and 12 gallons of gas for it and hooked it all up for us. So now we can watch tv (the cable came back on Wednesday) and keep the fridge going. That is nice because ice was super hard to get and we were about to just have to let everything we had saved ruin.
So now we are just waiting. Centerpoint has us in the "By end of day Monday" timeline for our zip code. Tonight we are going to stay home again but tomorrow morning, Teddy has a vet appt for shots and then we are going to pack up some stuff and head over to Dave and Jennifers to stay the night. Hopefully by Sunday we have power.

The dogs are doing fine. You can tell they are a little freaked because nothing is normal, but they are generally happy and ok. Today they are at day care because the weather is heating back up a little bit. We didn't want them in a hot house all day!!! Plus this way they get to play all day and get some energy out.

Through the stress, I went into survivor mode and stopped eating much. I have since lost 7 pounds and still have kept it off :)

Things are calming down. You don't see lines for gas anymore. Grocery stores are getting re-stocked with meat, ice, dairy, frozen, etc. I am so mad that I lost most of my frozen goods. I had the best freezer going. All kinds of frozen veggies and meats... i could make a meal really easily! All the meat is here at work, but I lost all my veggies. Boo!

I just want to be normal again. I want to cook dinners and bake cookies and just relax. My house is a mess and we need to do about 2 loads of laundry.

And on top of all of it, i missed my Great Grandma's funeral. How do I deal with that? I cried all the way home yesterday (which took an hour). I cried when I got home...

Then Lee and Donald went to the store and got big steaks! Plus trash magazines for me and cookies! We watched a movie and the night felt so normal for one.

I'm Still Alive...

We made it through. I will do a much more thorough post later, as I am using internet at work right now. The scariest part was from 2am - 6am. We hid in our hallway the whole time and I was almost stick to my stomach with fear. Our house is fine, no damage. Still now power (day 3) but the cool front that came in has helped ALOT. We have food and water and many places are opening back up. We need some ice but I think since power is coming back to many stores, we should be getting some soon. I had lunch at the Galleria today and so many people were there for A/C and using outlets to charge phones. Who would ever think you would ever have to do that?
Houston is being awesome, we are all pulling together.
Here is our front yard the morning after:
Needless to say, we have a freshly pruned tree!!
We probably won't have power back until Friday I think. They are working 24 hours a day to get it back so we can only hope.
I will make a much better post later on. Just wanted to check in!

Oh yes, to top off everything... My great grandmother dies at 6:15am this morning. She was 91 years old and in hospice care. He funeral is on Thursday in Kansas and I don't think I can even go. I mean, I have no power, my city is in shambles, and to turn around and drive 9 hours there and back in a few days????
I just can't comprehend all these things.

Waiting Game

We haven't stopped watching the news in like 24 hours. Go to sleep with the news, wake up with the news... have coffee with the news... clean the house with the news... you get the point.
Ok so at our house, we will start seeing rain bands around noon with 30mph winds. Then around 6pm, lots more rain and 50mph winds. The big mamma comes in at 3am with 70mph winds. Now, all this starts in Galveston before, but this is the time line for us. We are seeing a breeze right now and some clouds are moving in.
Knowing how I am, I am cleaning the house (dishes, sweeping, dusting) and generally keeping busy.
I read an article on MSNBC - and the headline is so devious!
"OFFICIALS: FLEE IKE OR FACE CERTAIN DEATH."
Ok - so that does not mean HOUSTON. That means Southeast Texas and the coast, etc. Here is a direct quote that I found when I actually read the article:
"Houstonions urged to 'shelter in place'." It also talked about how we, in the metropolitan area, will see gusts of strong winds, but that the best thing to do is to stay put and have a safe place away from windows.
I have our bag of supplies, and I am going to have extra blankets and pillows out in the hall before we go to bed so that in the event we need to get out of our bedroom (windows), the hall is ready and we don't have to scramble. We have thick cardboard and plastic sheeting ready for broken windows. I actually feel happier being here because if a window does break, we are here to deal with it, you know?
By the time it hits downtown (which we are 10 min from), it will be a Cat 1. So please don't think I am sitting here while a Cat 3 goes over my house!
I will update as I can!

Waiting Game

We haven't stopped watching the news in like 24 hours. Go to sleep with the news, wake up with the news... have coffee with the news... clean the house with the news... you get the point.
Ok so at our house, we will start seeing rain bands around noon with 30mph winds.

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season...

Here is what we are and are not doing.
We are not leaving. We are not in an evacuation zone. Our house did not flood during the famous Tropical Storm Allison (or ever for that matter) so we are pretty secure about that.
We have 3+ cases of water. 7 bags of ice. Lots of meat that is frozen that we could grill if we lose power (after the storm passes of course!). We have sandwich meat, cheese, and bread. We have 3 flashlights, batteries, plastic sheets in case a window breaks, etc. We even have a wind-up radio so we could stay in touch with reality. We hope we don't lose power. I think it is pretty certain we will, but hopefully not too awful long. One upside is that our oven and water heater are powered by gas. So we could stay in our house a good while, provided it does not get too terribly hot.
We are trying to be smart about how we prepare. We are trying not to worry too much and make bad decisions. We are leaving Lee's car at his work in the parking garage and putting mine in our garage at home. Since my car is so small, we can probably get the grill and rocking chairs in behind it. I am getting laundry and such done tonight so that we at least won't have to worry about that (i am such a woman, i know!)
I will do my best to keep everyone updated. Call my cell if you are really worried!

Pet's Playing

We are watching Tashi, Jennifer and Dave's dog, for a few days while Dave gets his gallbladder removed. Here is a picture I took (with my phone) of them playing outside.
Notice Lola all the way to the right. We call that "wallering."

Pictures!

Here are some picture updates on the house:See the pillows on the bench? LOVE!
That is my very own hand-made butcher block my papa made a long time ago. He made 4 and I am lucky to have one!
Here is the front with new flowers and the small snaffu on the window paint, which we are starting to not mind so much. I picked up the navy (see garage door) today to re-do the window, what do you think?
In other news, we watched the UT game last night and the puppies brought their spirit along!Lola tried to reject the shirt, but she got used to it!I didn't say she was happy, I just said she was used to it!Teddy was happy just to be included!
I also hand washed my car in the driveway today, which was kinda neat. Something people that own houses do I guess. Other than that, i did the flowers and then took a nap because I got a little hot then a headache...
I still need to work on the guest room and study clutter, but otherwise the house is really shaping up to look finished. What a very busy weekend. Now I am off to put a pork loin roast in the oven.

Lipstick on a Pig...

Today was a work day in the Nash home. Donald came over and we had breakfast and then headed off to Lowe's. We started thinking about some of the things that needed to be done around here and we said "it is just lipstick on a pig for the appraiser!"

Good things we did:

• Did all the paint touch-up in the kitchen. Now the kitchen is 99.99% done. Tomorrow I am getting throw pillows for the bench and we still need wood blinds. Otherwise - DONE!(Donald did all this by the way.)

• Bleached the bathroom floor. The grout was never sealed and white grout.. ick. So now it looks like I actually clean the floor!
• Added another coat of paint to the bead-board in the bathroom. The contractor only slapped one coat on and you could see every swipe and miss. Looked bad! While I was at it, I hit the base boards.
  
• Lee went nuts with the caulking gun. I think everything in the house has a fresh coat of caulk!
• Cleaned out the garage. I am not embarrassed to open the door anymore!
• Planted fresh begonias in the front box. Let's see how long they live!
  
• Cleaned off the rocking chairs and put them back on the porch.

The bad:
I had an idea to paint the ugly aluminum on the front windows. The idea itself is not bad... but we used white. Which.. looks odd? I think if we had used midnight blue like we have on the trim and the garage door it would have been a little more successful! So now I am out tomorrow to Sherwin Williams to hope to God I can remember which paint it is on the trim and quickly fix this snaffu! We will just pretend the white is primer!

Good day! Tomorrow I am de-cluttering and cleaning the closets out. I need to sweep everywhere and mop the kitchen floor. I want the appraisal on our house to be really good, so let's hope.
Maybe new bathmats too.... ;)

Football season is here! Tonight the puddies will don their UT t-shirts and root the orange team on. Tomorrow they will don their Cowboy's collars and root for the best team!!

Oil is not Oil...

Do not substitute Canola Oil for Vegetable Oil when making brownies (the box kind, i was lazy)...
Just don't.