The Log

Last weekend we started another project. With all of the timber lying around we couldn't resist the opportunity presented to use the available logs to make something cool, so we picked up a 5 foot long and 3 foot across section of an old oak (I think its an oak) that was blown down during Ike. It was lying on the side of the street in front of the neighborhood elementary school.

How did we do do it you ask? Well, let's just say that even though we thought we could use the truck, there was absolutely no machine power involved, all muscle power. We simply went over to Father Jose's house for migrant labor and hired a few helping hands, and rolled this puppy about 6 blocks down the middle of the street, including up and over a railroad grade and into the garage. You can imagine the looks we got as we were cruising down the street pushing this baby by hand. When we finish a few other projects around here, hopefully we can turn it into a table base for the back of the house.

Bathroom Update

We're finally making more progress on the bathroom, so we thought we should share a few pics of how that is going. We've got most of the walls and floors prepared for the final covering (except in the shower area). This meant a lot of joint compound and sanding, as well as a bunch of hardibacker for the floor and some walls.

Here's a shot of the wall that we'll cover with slate, next to to the tub.

Here's the stairs with almost all of their hardibacker on.The last two weekends we've spent time cutting the slate from 12 x 12 down to about 2 x 12 to put it on the wall. Its a long process when there's 30 some boxes of slate. Here's some shots of some of the slate drying on the driveway and then stored in the garage.

Friday this week the plumbers came back and fixed the shower pan. Now we just have to hope that we pass the city inspection on tuesday. If so, then we'll be able to start putting the wall back together in the shower (cool!)

More Oral Surgery

Raquel had her second oral surgery of the year on Friday to put in the post for her implant. She's pretty wiped out from that and from hurting her back the week after the hurricane. Despite her hesitation she allowed me to publish a few shots.

Here she is right after the surgery in the recovery room. (Cute huh?) Even though I was talking with her when I took this picture, she doesn't remember me taking it at all.

Here she is on Sunday morning. Still pretty swollen on that side, and very painful. She is grateful for not feeling any pain on the day of the surgery, but now even with the medication it is starting to hurt. She says she is looking like "Fofao" - a Brazilian children's character from her childhood.

Here are a couple of shots of Fofao for comparison.

FEMA POD

Raquel got to take the week off after the storm, but Neil's agency went right back to work. Since all of the facilities were out of power or unusable we were asked to work at FEMA POD (Point of Distribution) sites. FEMA trucks in a bunch of food, water and ice to a regional distribution point, then the city and county governments are in charge of setting up local distribution points and handing out the stuff to the population. When we showed up to volunteer that day, we had county building permit employees, TSA screeners from Chicago, and eventually Customs and Border Enforcement agents helping out. These are few shots of Neil and his staff helping out. They're in the cool red shirts. (These pictures were taken by one of Neil's co-workers).

Here we are unloading the trucks to get ready for the people to come through.

This site was set up in the parking lot a large church. Once we unloaded and got set up, cars flowed into the parking lot and around the church building to where we were. They flowed right through and we tossed stuff into the trunk or through the windows. Neil was traffic control dude at the front of the line, trying to keep the cars flowing in so we could keep the line moving (it stretched at least 2 miles after we got started).

Notice the cops in the background. I'm not sure what they were there to do (show the uniform I guess) because all they did was sit around on that car like it was a doughnut shop.

Overall it was a good day. This was the Monday site, it was well organized and efficient and people moved through pretty well. The 2nd day wasn't so great. The trucks didn't get there until 1PM, and there were a lot of people walking through, which meant that some of them stood in line from before 6AM until 1PM in the warm Houston sun waiting. After two days of this, our administration building got power back and we moved in there to start trying to get back to our regular jobs. Raquel was lucky, in that she got to stay at home the whole week.

By Monday the 22nd, both of us were back at work in our regular buildings. Raquel had to be careful though, there is still glass all over the streets and sidewalks downtown, and they've erected the scaffolding type covers over the walkways around her building to protect people from glass that may still fall from the buildings.

Ike and the Plants

Some additional Ike damage pictures that we thought were cool included what happened to the plants during the storm. I mentioned in the last post that the pecan tree looked a little light in the leaf department, well, this happened to any plant that had leaves sticking up into the wind. The wind literally shredded or ripped the leaves off of the plants.

Here are a couple of shots of the pecan tree. If you blow them up you can see how most of the leaves look like they've been half eaten by bugs. This was the shredding by the wind. You'll also notice the distinct lack of pecans on the tree. They ended up coating the driveway and front yard. Too early for us to find them tasty, but the squirrels still like them.

Moving to the side yard, the climbing rose was totally stripped of its leaves on the branches that reach up into the sky.In the backyard, the same thing happened to the bougainvillea. The leaves from the bougainvillea ended up coating the back of the house. Looking out the back windows was like looking through polka dotted windows, and the walls looked like they had a tan and green polka dotted paint scheme.In the end, God protected us from major damage, for which we are grateful. Other than the pictures on this and previous post, we lost some shingles and took some water damage inside the house, plus we lost a few of the garden plants. Not too bad considering what could have happened. In the neighborhood just across the freeway from us, a lot of their trees dropped onto the houses.

Post-Ike Post

OK, we've got the Pre-Ike Post, then the Ike post, now its time for a Post-Ike Post. By mid-afternoon on Saturday after the storm it had calmed down enough that everyone was out of their houses and wandering around, so we wandered out ourselves to take a look at the damage. Our neighbors that we had dinner with the night before were just starting their tour, so we joined them and took some pictures of the neighborhood.

Here's the front corner of the house. The pecan tree seems a little light in leaf department (more on that later).

You can see a couple of our small trees are leaning from the wind and the ground being so soft from the water. Its hard to tell from this angle, but the fence is leaning out away from the house at a pretty good angle also. We stood the trees back up and braced them, but I wasn't about to take on the fence with my bare hands. Its still leaning.

There are some pretty good sized office buildings just a block or two away from us. The black one is 1 block down and one over from our house, it lost all of the sheet metal from the top super structure of the building. The sheet metal was laying all over the neighborhood.

On the other side of the black building we came upon this fence all ripped out and twisted like a big whirly-gig. (I don't know what that's supposed to be.)

Later in the afternoon we got out for a short drive. This is the bridge over Buffalo Bayou, looking east toward downtown. This is about 15 or so blocks south of the house. The bayou is normally about 30 feet wide. You can see that it expanded some to accomodate all of the rain.

Hurricane Ike

Earlier this week we finally got our internet back. Power has been back since the evening of Wednesday the 17th. Now that we have everything we need to blog, I thought I would try to start catching you up on all of the action around here. This first post should give you a little taste of what it was like during Hurricane Ike at our house (or outside our house anyway, I didn't get any indoor action shots of me holding the doors closed against the wind or placing Raquel's cake pans in the attic to catch the water coming in the roof).

It started with a few wind gusts on Friday late in the afternoon just to let us know the storm was approaching. When we went to dinner at our next door neighbor's house we noticed this tree across the street, it hadn't even stood the first little gust.

Here is some video early in the storm, about 2AM on Saturday morning, when the front part of the storm is passing over Houston. This is shot out the back door of the house (looking northwest). The light you see is over Interstate 10, which is about 2 blocks from the house and you can barely make out the rain moving horizontally past it right to left.

This next video looks out the front door of the 2nd floor of the house at about 6:30 in the morning. By this time the wind was blowing out of the south and west, as the storm had turned north and we were on the back side of it.

Here's another from the back patio at about the same time. The storm has obviously calmed down by this time, as the wind is not as bad as the original video.

Here's a final shot out the front of the house with some commentary. I tried to keep the camera lens from getting wet and it interferes with the shot, even then you'll still notice the water get blown in on the lens.

It was shortly after this video that I talked with Dad and John about still having power, and then went to bed at about 9:30 since Raquel was up and the storm was winding down. Only after that did we lose power.