On topic: Wow, looks like half of the English GSC forum membership is here already! Thank you,
Nightwatch, for opening up this forum. I hope it doesn't eat you for lunch.
"... where everybody knows your name..."
I joined to stop the mailbombing. :P We're mostly okay, living in northeast Texas -- close to
Tejas Slacker, if I recall correctly.
The coast was hammered (that was one fat storm) along with portions on the east side of Ike's center as it tracked northward. We were supposed to get four to six inches of rain per the Friday forecast, but it veered a bit northeast early on Saturday as if aiming for
fatrap and
audioave10, so we only saw an inch or so. Portions west of us got a lot more, as well as points north, east, and south.
Wow, it was dumping rain on
Kansas* while the center was southeast of Dallas/Fort Worth -- and it was still raining on the Gulf Coast!
I had to argue with my wife on Wednesday, persuading her not to fly to Houston on a business trip Thursday morning. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll be flying back at least seven hours before Ike comes ashore." (Landfall was expected about midnight Friday/Saturday.)
I'm glad she acquiesced. The storm surge (which doesn't include the wave tops!) was already about 10 feet above normal sea level at six p.m. Friday. They stopped flights out of Houston well before landfall. Folks weren't even going into work on Friday down there.
A few portions of Houston will attempt some business-as-usual on Tuesday. Many folks going back to work will be leaving homes that don't have power. What gasoline is available is very expensive.
The storm surge wasn't as great as predicted, but the devastation is pretty bad, and compounded by the large percentage of the residents who didn't listen to the mandatory evacuation order, proving to be just as dumb as the reporters who had to show us the waves coming over the Galveston seawall (17 feet above sea level) and the flying debris. Galveston is now a small version of New Orleans post Katrina.
Edit: My current avatar is a low-quality reduction of a picture of my smart, lovely and patient wife, taken at the beginning of this month, and it is still far easier to look at than most Internet avatars. She's given me permission to use it; she has not given me permission to admit that she is 56 years old. I'm proud of how good she looks
for any age, even though she makes me look really old. If you want to know what I look like, consider Doc in the original STALKER. I have more hair -- momentarily -- and I'm thinner. My beard is mostly white.
I post this to say that while
Remac still has the record, all of you youngsters should consider this: you only get old when you stop learning. :P As for you,
Remac: Considering your sig, I'll bet you're a hoot at church.
__________
*Kansas is a state north of the state of Oklahoma, which is north of Texas. Texas itself is considered by some to be a small country. They are wrong, of course -- it is a large country. (Don't be fooled by Mercator map projections of Alaska.) :P