In the days after Ike wolloped up, I felt a real urge to regain as much normalcy as possible. At around noon on Saturday, even though it was still raining, I put on a poncho and did a loop around our neighborhood. I took some photographs, which I’ll post later. Once the rain stopped, one of the first things I did was get all of the stuff out of our living room that normally lives in the back yard. Patio chairs and table, wind chimes, lawn chairs, etc. It made our house seem much less cluttered and it made me feel better.
We took the gas grill that normally sits on the back patio out the front entrance, where we have a covered porch of sorts. It’s not a big porch, but we have a bench out there, and there was room for the grill on one side and a small table on the other where we set up the propane-fuelled Coleman stove. That became our kitchen, and we cooked some great meals out there, from steak to spaghetti to stew. The fact that we could keep our fridge running several hours a day meant that we didn’t have to resort to canned foods. We ate the most perishable things (bacon and eggs the morning after the storm) and worked our way through the rest.
Now that we’re in downtown Houston, we have all the amenities. Yesterday morning we had bagels at a branch of the place where we normally breakfast, and last night we had Mexican food and margaritas. I even watched House and Big Brother. I wonder if Wilson is really going to leave the show or if there is just going to be a lot of drama about his existential question about whether he and House were ever friends or not.
I was surprised that Dan won unanimously. There was a lot of unanimity in the votes this season, and I wonder if the jurors got together and decided, once it was clear that one person would win, to make it a unified vote. I was happy that Keesha won the juror award of $25,000. I think she played a very solid and honorable game that she should be pleased with, and her compensation, while not as much as Dan or Memphis, wasn’t bad for a couple of months’ “work.”
