Despite the 30 minutes spent on the twinspan while an accident was cleared (our best guess), we made it home in a little over 3 hours. At 4pm, our street looked good, piles of debris in front of those who’d already been industrious enough to clean up a bit.  The plan is to clean up our parts of the street tomorrow… but no new or replacement planting. Paul went out and took a few photos, but they came out blurry…
We took off the board covering the front door but are not unlatching any of the shudders or removing any of the boards from the other windows. We are not re-hanging the porch swing or putting up the fern baskets, which are baking in the backyard. We are not bringing back any of the pots to the stairs. Inside, the walls of the house are bare because we left the pictures and paintings at my parents house.
All of this non-reparation is because we are concerned that sometime in the next few days we will be headed out again. IKE, you suck.
Paul turned back on the water heater and gas. All was fine until we moved to the a/c. One unit perked right up. The other… nothing. Paul crawled around roof and attic, searching for problems until he found that the blower wasn’t spinning up. We called a repair place and spoke to the technician, who agreed with Paul’s hunting work and said he’d try to come by tomorrow — the fee just for showing up is $99 and it goes up from there. This could hurt.
Until then, the front of the house is relatively cool and the back is not. We are all sleeping above the covers and trying to keep things as dark as possible. It’s not like we’ve lived without a/c before; as long as the kids are not whiny over it, we’re totally fine with the heat. (No, we can’t open the windows… they are sealed shut.)
One perk: since we’d emptied the fridge before we left, I decided to clean it before putting things back inside. I have a special affinity for this machine, since it is a bit of a dinosaur in this town… it’s a PRE-KATRINA fridge. (I had a bad feeling about Katrina and cleaned out our fridge before we left.) Behold, our sparkling pre-K and now post-G fridge. 
It is highly unlikely anything in our lives will look so new and shiny for awhile. We are run-down and beat-up right now, doing our best to keep an eye on the news without tuning in to any turned on weather folk. Going on what happened last time, I’m surprised that the Governor hasn’t already issued a State of Emergency and started mandatory evacuations. All that hyper-vigilance over Gustav could really come ’round to bite us all, much sooner than expected…?
Post a Comment