Obladi oblada, life goes on...

**Wait, even Heather K! She got power today along with Rita. Not Shana though, and it was muggy there! I hung out with her today and offered my house, but no taker. Stoplights are getting better every day too. Progress, not perfection.

Not for Heather K though. Still no lights, but blessed with a mighty good generator so it isn't total hell. Just 90% hell. Shana still has no lights and no generator, so they mostly go out to her parents all the way in Rosenberg except for Jeff who must work in the city and therefore lives in his powerless house. Traffic is at a record horribleness since you get off the freeway and the lights just blink. And people just aren't great at the four way stop system, I'll tell you that right now. Word is we can expect all lights to be fixed by Nov. Wow, just wow.

A lot of people magically got the lights yesterday though, and our evacuees moved out. Too bad too, we liked having them there. Nick and Ben were mighty good houseguests, minus the time when Ben came home drunk out of his mind (thank you, absinthe from Amsterdam) and while in the house at 3 am felt he had to turn on the house alarm. The house alarm that has motion detectors, of course, and as soon as the countdown was over the alarm went off. At 3 am we aren't listening for our cell phones, so the police did arrive. Hey, you get three false alarms a year without a fine, so one down. We didn't realize any of this until I saw the message from Brinks and the story unraveled. Pretty funny. Otherwise, the boys were incredibly grateful and gracious (I mean, they even got us a thank you card and gift! Boys did that!) and we liked having them down the street. Plus they all got to start planning the frat house that will be the back building and we are all stoked about the black light posters and strobe lights that will contain.



But if the boys' presence did anything, it reminded us that there is an absolutely amazing house just down the street that we could be potentially living in. That totally lit the fire under us to get some work done... Ike of course caused many days in the yard dragging out limbs as Paul kept cutting and cutting... but last weekend, Paul and Jason hooked up the washer and dryer for the evacuees after getting them from storage and we moved some more furniture in. The new gate was welded in for the driveway (just need to finish the fence next to it) and Paul picked up the metal for the back fence yesterday (and it is an awesome shade of green, and their other metal fence totally survived Ike with flying colors). The boys installed the kitchen sink and the stovetop and it looks like a real kitchen. We even bought the rest of the tile to do the kitchen backsplash and last night we grouted the bathroom floor. So close, people. If we weren't leaving this weekend for Vegas, there's a fantastic chance we'd be done.









And by the way, pretty sure those people who moved into the vacant house for like 2 days were just squatters. It wasn't like the key under the mat was a big secret and Paul saw the one man there weeks ago checking it out. But they were there a couple days in large, loud numbers and then never to be seen again. They were ghetto to the max though, so if they were just squatting, it was prolly good for us all that it was temporary. And now, a gratuitous cute shot of Dylan...