Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 19th & 20th

After sleeping until 6 o;clock, late for me, I took my cold shower and just laid around on Saturday. I finally got up and went to Kim's house to wash my clothes and to charge my telephones. Since our radios were not working properly, with a busy signal most of the time, we had been issued new Nextel phones that were equipped with the direct connect walkie-talkie feature. Mine had not had a full charge all week because of no power at home to charge them at night and only an hour or so in the morning when I got to work. The police radios were not working because everyone in the three county area were working off one radio repeater tower because many of the other towers were down. I theorize that they are down because there is no power for the towers and no one thought about putting in generators to run the towers. The cell phone towers were likely the same story, but again this is just my theory and I'm sure that I would get in trouble if I voiced this concern.

I got to Kim's house and found Jeremy asleep (all day long) because he had been up late the night before unloading the last of his patients off a bus after being returned from their evacuation location. The boys and I went riding around to see what damage we could see. We came back by the house and found a group from the Mormon church doing yard cleanup for me. They had contacted the city to get all of our addresses so that they could perform this service for us. They wouldn't take as much as a drink of water from me, and I later learned that they had called Stella's phone to verify that the work was done to my satisfaction. Wow, what a wonderful service they performed for us.

The boys and I just hung out all afternoon, with me sleeping most of the time. We went out to eat Saturday night, which was the first hot food that I had eaten in over a week. Many of the restaurants were still closed, but luckily Ryan's in Texas City was open. I went home to bed about 8 o'clock and slept until after 6, another long night of rest!

Sunday morning I went back to Kim's house and picked up the boys, thinking that we could do some more work in the yard. I had put a large Igloo ice chest in the Expedition for iced-down water for the volunteers on Friday but someone had beaten me to the punch, so I needed to get the ice chest back to the office so the company that furnished them could come get them. We took a ride back to Manvel so I could show them some of the damage done to the area and ended up eating breakfast at the Waffle House in Texas City. The food wasn't the best I've ever eaten but since this was one of the few restaurant open for breakfast, it was certainly welcome. I hung out at Kim's house again to enjoy the air conditioning, tv and Internet. I napped a lot in the afternoon and went back home about 7.

Another hot sweaty night at home.