Harris County Dispatch:  Harris County Emergency Services.  State the nature of your emergency please.
JK:  Oh my god!  We have an emergency here cause by Hurricane Ike!
HC: Calm down sir and tell me your name and where you are.
JK:  I’m at home and I’m JK!  Help us please!
HC: What is the nature of your emergency?
JK:  We’re out of Double-Stuf Oreos!  Help us, please!
HC:  Sir, this line is for life or death emergencies only due to the storm.  A lot of people need our help and we must leave the line open for them.
JK:  But you don’t understand, this is going to be life or death!  When we got our supplies for the storm they only had one pack of Oreos left and the kids have eaten all of them!  We don’t have any left and it’s going to get nasty!
HC:  Sir, if you don’t have a real emergency I’m going to have to hang up.
JK:  But you have to understand!  The kids are already restless after 24 hours with no TV!  It’s getting very testy here and I just discovered they ate all the Oreos!  And they were Double-Stuf Oreos!  Somebody’s going to get hurt if you don’t get out here and it’s not going to be me!
HC:  I understand now sir.  We’ll have someone out as soon as we can.
JK:  Bless you.  Can they pick up some Oreos on the way over?

The winds are still strong but not as ferocious as they have been since last night so we’ve been able to begin a very preliminary assessment of the damage that Ike inflicted.  I’ve mentioned the uprooted tree in the back yard, it may be salvageable I hope.  Perhaps they can transplant it.  On a more serious note we have determined there is a leak in the roof which means some damage up there.  There is a very slow leak in one of the bedroom closets upstairs.  It’s not leaking much but roof damage is never easy to deal with.  That particular side of the house must have been hit harder as the fence between my house and the one next door is completely down.  It looks like it was simply blown over by the hurricane force winds.  There is also a small leak in the front door around the beveled glass insert.  It didn’t leak a lot but the high force with which the wind blew the rain into the door looks like it forced water through the seal of the glass.

All in all that’s pretty minor and we are lucky if this is the extent of our damage from Hurricane Ike.  We can’t walk around outside yet so we may find some more surprises later.  I hope not but it’s too early to tell.  If we can just get the wind and rain to stop for a while we’ll be OK.  At least it has slowed down enough that we feel like the end is in sight and that’s a nice feeling.  This is far from over though, as it will probably be a while before power can be restored.  With such a large area suffering outages there is no telling how long before they get to our area.  The same will apply to repairmen to get the roof and other things fixed.  There will almost certainly be a huge backlog for qualified repair people so we’ll just have to get in line with everyone else.  It could have been much worse and for that we’re thankful.  I hope everyone in the area came through as swimmingly as we have, no pun intended.

Millions of people like us are now all faced with getting appropriate repairs done and we will all need it at the same time.  This will lead to frustrating delays but just hang in there, it will all get fixed.  A lot of people will be dealing with insurance companies for these repairs and I’m afraid that many will find out what going with a "budget" insurance company will end up costing them in time and money.  Bear with your insurance company employees as they are now over-worked.  Be civil to them, this is not their fault and they will take care of you as soon as they can.  You catch more flies with honey, so they say.  A word of caution based on experience: hordes of unscrupulous con men will come out of the woodwork to take advantage of those who need help.  Whatever you do go with reputable companies to get your repair work done.  It’s not worth the risk to save a few bucks and if they promise to save you a lot more than that it’s probably too good to be true.  And you know what they say if it sounds too good to be true..

In spite of all of my mobile gear, the many laptops and batteries, EV-DO connectivity and the like there is one thing I don’t have that I really missed.  A wired mouse.  You know, one of those old school mice with an actual wire to connect to the computer?  While I was working away in the dark on the various laptops I wished more than once for a mouse to make that work easier.  Search I did but in vain, it seems I have converted everything over to wireless and the mice were no exception.  My desire to conserve battery power as much as possible kept me from plugging one of the wireless mice into my laptop to work.  I know, it probably would have used so little power that it wouldn’t have made any difference but I didn’t want to take a chance so I went mouse-less.  Next time I’ll have a cheapo wired mouse in the drawer.

My household is in a unique position in that we have three different cellular carriers in use.  We also have 3G with all of them so I am in a unique position to offer insights into how they have performed in this emergency situation.  T-Mobile is not 3G in my house but I tested the voice network periodically throughout this ordeal.  My results were sketchy, the signal strength varied although it never went away completely.  AT&T has shown good voice signal but the EDGE network on the iPhone has been less than stellar.  My house never has 3G signal but EDGE normally is full bars strong but the storm has affected that.  I find the EDGE signal bars to bounce between one and three and as a result the bandwidth on the iPhone has been pretty bad.  Most of the time it will do email, albeit slowly, but surfing the web on the phone has been awful.  Verizon has been the champ as they usually are.  The EV-DO network has been rock-solid and the signal/ bandwidth has never wavered.  Voice calls have worked flawlessly and text messaging has not failed once, something I can’t say about the other two carriers.  Game Verizon.

I have once again been totally impressed with the HP 2710p which has been my major conduit to the outside world throughout Hurricane Ike.  The battery life with the slice battery has been amazing and the utility of working with the HP on EV-DO has been awesome.  I have really come to appreciate a unique feature of the 2710p that I admit I haven’t used much.  The Illumi-Light (I think it’s called) is a little light on the top of the screen next to the webcam that pops out when you press a button.  The little light gives just enough light to illuminate the keyboard and this has been so useful in the dark.  This feature absolutely rocks in this situation and I am happy that HP kept this feature on the new 2730p.  It’s amazing how it’s often the little things like this that make a huge difference in trying circumstances like living with Ike.  The above photo of the 2710p shows the little light in action, forgive the darkness of the photo as it’s unavoidable.

The latest report on the radio puts us in hurricane force winds for at least another 3 hours so it feels like it’s going on forever.  They are saying the storm proper will not be out of the area until tonight so we have all day to enjoy the wind and rain.  I am conserving the batteries in my gear for keeping up with news and the occasional blog post here.  I am still showing over 4.5 hours battery left on the HP 2710p, an amazing amount considering how much I have used it for the occasional video coverage.  The MacBook Pro is showing I have another 6 hours of battery left so I’m covered for the rest of today.  As always in a situation like this I am really thankful for the Verizon Broadband Access EV-DO.  It’s a lifesaver.

For perspective here is the current storm track forecast:

"All neighborhoods … and possibly entire coastal communities …will be inundated during the peak storm tide," the weather servicewarned. "Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single family one- ortwo-story homes will face certain death."

But farther inland, 4million Houston-area residents were told to hunker down and stay home,even as government offices and schools prepared to close Friday inanticipation of the hurricane.

"We are only evacuating areassubject to a storm surge," said Harris County Judge Ed Emmett, thecounty’s chief executive officer. "Yes, we know you will loseelectricity. But you’re not in danger of losing your life, so stay put."

So on the coast you face certain death, yet those further inland like us should just stay put.  Drives home why we are so uneasy about this storm.  It is not following the rules.