Bringing the Drama

i made it back to birmingham Sunday afternoon and got back in time to go to church with cj. the church meets in a fantastic old building. it was pretty awesome.

today involved lunch with a group of people i didn’t know, hanging out with someone i hadn’t seen in 6 years, and a birthday party that involved guitar hero. oh, and keeping up on Gustav. i talked with my sister who had stayed, she’s okay. her apartment is okay but without power. she has since moved to my aunt and uncle’s house which is nearby because it has power. something like 85% of the parish (or county) has no power. i’m not sure if i’ll go back tomorrow or not. i asked my sister if she can go by my house (which is REALLY close to her apartment, why didn’t she go by today?!?) tomorrow morning and let me know what’s up. i was able to check my utility company’s website and find out my house doesn’t have power. i’m not THAT worried like i was after katrina, but i guess in this case no news is not necessarily good news.

my parents are having a great time in Tuscaloosa. they had evacuated initially to get up to birmingham, but after drama with traffic (6 hours just to go about 80 miles to start off!), they called me when they got to the tuscaloosa area. i told them to get off the interstate and take a break, and after that, just go to hotels and try to find a room. my mom was trying to reserve one, but i had heard on the radio last week that just going to hotels sometimes helped. they found a room about 15 minutes after we talked, so were all excited to finally have a place to go. my dad called me this afternoon to tell me they found a Five Guys and had a delicious burger. i had told them how fantastic Five Guys was after i had eaten at one in Florida on the youth retreat. they are probably going to go back on Wednesday.

as far as i know, no one i know has had damage to their house. the storm definitely was not nearly as bad, and all reports were of less than expected rain and winds. miraculously, the storm had weakened before it made landfall. i was watching a local news feed over the internet, and saw how the storm was coming in this morning. it was cool to see flood wall additions to their jobs. at lunch, they had a tv on CNN which when i was watching showed a reporter in the middle of a rain squall holding an anemometer upside down. i couldn’t hear what he was saying but it might have been “OMG! you won’t believe how strong these winds are!” i think they wanted levees to break or something. the headline on their website earlier today was a lot different from local websites. oh well, Gustav certainly did not disappoint me!