The boys finally got to go back to school this morning (Monday). Altogether, they missed 6 days of school. Jacob had been up around 5-6am-ish all last week, so of course today, when he actually got to go to school, he was firmly in sleep mode. As in, trying to sleep through sitting on the potty, stumbling to the couch and back to sleep for a half an hour. He finally shrugged into his clothes and had time for a few bites of breakfast before the bus came. Definitely bleary eyed. Brandon wasn't real happy to be heading back. 13 schools in the Ft. Bend district are still without power, so we (ok, Jacob and I) were lucky that they kids' schools are back up and running.
They've started picking up debris. It's the county that's in charge of it, but the cities have to pony-up their share. The downside? You have to do it just so, in order to get FEMA re-imbursement, and usually they don't get the info out to the cities in a timely manner. First, after most of MP had been cleaned up and ready for pick up, we were told that it was only non-bagged vegetation would be picked up (which I can kind of see, just in case household garbage had gotten tossed in). MP sent parks department personnel around to pick up the bags and dump them on the easement so that debris would get picked up, because no one wanted to tell the residents that after all the work they put in to getting the yards and streets picked up that it wasn't going to be hauled away. (We had moderate debris in the front yard, and we still had 12 contractor size bags of vegetation from just the front yard and driveway). Then, it was the lumber from fencing had to be stacked seperate from the vegetation, which caused a lot of people to have to go out and sort their pile. Now it's, please don't park on the street otherwise we won't pick up. Lots of grumbling going on down in these parts. I definitely think that FEMA has gotten better since Katrina in '95, but it's still...somewhat non-sensical and lacking direction. How hard is it to issue rules to likely to be hit areas before a storm hits so municipalites know what to expect? We are all lucky over in this area, so debris pick-up rules seem kind of stupid to get cranky about, I know.
We're supposed to have the first camping trip for scouts this weekend, but I don't know yet if it's still on. Campgrounds are still kind of full from people without power and/or habitable houses. It's at a campground that is still within the city limits of Houston, so I don't know how that will work with the curfew that is still going on. Lots of questions left that hopefully Rick's meeting will take care of. Of course, that it contigent on Rick remembering he has a meeting tonight. He's been putting in a lot of hours for one of his contracts to give them a status report on the signals and such after the storm. Saturday night we got to pile into the minivan and drive around to 42 signals with him, with me taking notes by cell-phone light. Jacob liked it. Brandon, not so much.
Lines at the gas stations are all but gone over here on the southwest side. You can generally pull up to a pump with no waiting during the day. The stores are getting restocked slowly. Some fresh stuff is still hard to find, but getting better. We didn't lose as much food as a lot of people, but it still adds up having to restock the freezer and the refrigerator for stuff that had to be tossed. Between getting ready for the storm (plywood, batteries, food, water, etc.), the trip to the craft store for activities while the power was out and restocking the food that was tossed, Ike probably cost us about $600. A drop in the bucket compared to what a lot of people lost. The tab was probably higher than it needed to be, but I wanted to make sure we had enough water (bottles and jugs) and non-perishable food for at least a week, and I made sure we had probably closer to 2 weeks. I didn't want to wait in lines for hours for help if I could avoid it. We're very fortunate that we have that option, because a lot of people don't.
