The blur that was September

And now ladies and gentlemen, it’s finally time to tell the tale of just what exactly went down in that middle chunk of September. After all the delays and anticipation, I’m sure this post will disappoint just about everybody.

So there was this hurricane. It was big. And even though we live two hours from the coast, it still managed to turn everything upside down for a week or so.

Our location meant that we didn’t have to worry about anything other than the threat of some rain and heavy wind gusts and we didn’t even really get those. Hurricane Ike did bring us some pretty skies as it blew past though.

Hurricane party

For our families (The Wife and I both hail from the same swamp) though, things were a bit different. They were all squarely in Ike’s sights and all ended up evacuating to different spots around the state. My parents ended up staying up with us, which was great for me. Five days of my mom’s home cooking was a nice change of pace from our usual “whatever’s in the freezer” cuisine.

Since my brother goes to school here, he ended up hanging out over here a lot with his girlfriend as well. Add in my parents’ cat and dog, as well the mammals who normally live here, and things got pretty crowded at our house.

We generally sat around watching hour upon hour of hurricane coverage on TV and hoping that my parents would have something to go back to. I had the unique and painful experience of going grocery shopping in the midst of full-scale panic. Apparently none of the college students in town got the memo about our distance from the coast – it took me nearly two and half hours to fight the panicked crowds and buy some food to get us through the weekend.

We all had our ways of coping with the tedious hours of waiting. The Boy kept himself entertained by watching Garfield videos online. My parents’ cat decided that our house belonged to him and shamelessly lounged around on our couch for the entire weekend. The Dog, who doesn’t really deal with deviations from the routine all that well, decided to just hide and wait until things returned to normal. And just to give the whole thing a sense of the surreal, my father produced a ukulele and busted out in spirited song. I didn’t even know that he had a ukulele. I am very aware that he does now.

Fortunately for my parents, Ike decided to swing north before making landfall, meaning that my beloved hometown managed to miss the strongest part of the storm. There was still plenty of damage though. My parents just got their electricity restored a few days ago.  I went down the weekend after the storm to help my dad clear out all the debris in their yard and we must have cut up and hauled away a small forest’s worth of logs and branches. (I’ve got pictures, but they’re on my parents’ camera. I’ll have to remember to get a copy next time I see them.) You haven’t really lived until you’ve sat in total darkness without air conditioning along the Gulf Coast. Good times.

The important thing is that none of our families’ houses sustained any real damage and everybody was able to return home fairly quickly and in perfect health. The day before the storm came ashore, things were looking pretty grim for everybody. Sometimes you just get lucky I guess.

Birthday interrupted

Right smack in the middle of all this hurricane nonsense, The Boy turned six. Our plan had been to go down to The Swamp for the weekend and celebrate with family, but the whole mandatory evacuation thing put the kibosh on that.

Unfortunately, everybody evacuating to different places also made it impossible to have a big party at our place. We ended up making the best of a situation and had a low-key affair at home. The Boy was happy to have at least one set of grandparents there and the cake was a big hit as usual. Everyone had chipped in to get him a Wii (which he totally wasn’t expecting) and he was really excited about getting it. He even managed to give his sister a thank-you kiss for the present she gave him.

The next weekend we had arranged to reunite The Boy with his best friend from preschool (they go to different elementary schools now) for a trip to the Houston Zoo. We weren’t exactly sure how the zoo would be after the storm, but they said they were open so we headed down there and had a really good time.

The zoo – a place normally packed on a Saturday morning – was almost empty when we got there. By the time we left after lunch, the crowds of people tired of being stuck at home without power were starting to trickle in. But for the most of the morning, we were able to just leisurely stroll around and not have to fight a throng of folks to see every exhibit.

The Boy’s friend has a pair of twin sisters who also tagged along, so between the two families we had a small herd of our own. Looking back at it, the whole thing went incredibly smoothly considering that we had a pair of six-year olds, a pair of three-year olds and an eight-month old in tow. In addition to seeing the usual sights, we also had a picnic lunch and exchanged gifts. The Boy still refused to ride any moving portion of the carousel, but otherwise everyone had a good time.

Injury report

Before Ikeapalooza, The Girl started suddenly and unexpectedly vomiting at random intervals. And not just spitting up – we’re talking about a busted dam explosion of copious amounts of semi-digested foodstuffs. As one of the ladies at The Girl’s daycare put it in very fractured English, “Yes…There was so much of the puke…It… It was puke everywhere.”

The weird thing was The Girl seemed totally fine other than that. No fever. No loss of appetite. No fussiness. In fact, she was as happy as a pukey little clam.

Unsure as to what the problem was, but worried about the sickness, we took her to the doctor. Know what your child has when her only symptom is explosive vomiting? Double ear infections apparently.

The Wife and I were shocked. The Girl hadn’t been fussy at all when we laid her down or during feeding times. Her reaction to the ear infections was completely different from what we had experienced with The Boy. And apparently she has a pretty high tolerance for pain.

This past week, The Wife came down with some kind of sinus/drainage/hacking cough of death thing. It sounds like she spent her life smoking unfiltered Marlboros while working in coal mine. Her cough got so bad that she’s been sleeping sitting up in an attempt to stave off her coughing fits. Fortunately, she caved in and went to the doctor yesterday and got some drugs, so hopefully she’s on her way to recovery and once again becoming a semi-functional parent.

Cellular breakdown

Before she started breaking plumbing fixtures in our house, The Wife got her jollies by breaking her cell phone. Actually, I don’t think she was to blame on that one. Her phone had always been kind of hinkey since we got it two and a half years ago. (Yeah, that’s right – I said hinkey.)

Specifically, the earpiece speaker on her phone was shot. So if you called her, she’d start repeating “Hello?” over and over with increasing frustration because she couldn’t hear you. But the phone worked fine in speakerphone mode, so then she started taking every single call on speakerphone. That got old pretty quick.

So she needed a new phone. Since we’re fairly poor, we just got her one of the cheapo freebie phones that you get if you renew your contract. It’s not as fancy or trendy as her old RAZR, but it’s still pink. Those who bust phones can’t be choosy.

Of course, like everything involving mobile service, the entire process of getting a phone and transitioning her account was unnecessarily complicated. The AT&T bozos screwed up our rate plan and ended up splitting our family plan into two individual plans with different rates, so I had to go get that cleared up at our local AT&T store this morning.

Man, let me tell you – there’s a group of excited, savvy salespeople! I had a hard time getting more than a few grunts out of Lothar, my extremely unmotivated customer service rep. It’s entirely possible that he didn’t speak a lick of English. Or even work there. It was hard to tell.

I think everything’s cleared up now, but brace yourself for a possible rant when I get my next cell phone bill. I wouldn’t surprised if Lothar signed me up for some “everything’s international roaming” plan.

We meet again, Mr. Norris

For those of you who read this blog on a regular basis (all three of you), you remember our tee-ball run-in with the one and only Chuck Norris. Given the fact that I have a child very close in age to his twins, I figured there was the possibility that we might cross paths again. I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.

Fueled by post-Olympic delusions of grandeur, The Boy has started taking gymnastics lessons once a week at a place just down the road from our house. (I’ll no doubt cover this all in greater detail later in a separate blog post.) He’s been going for about a month now and so far things have gone better than I had anticipated.

The first two weeks were kind of boring, at least for us parents stuck watching from a distance. On the third week, the Norris family showed up and the whole place turned into a circus. Now the place is jam-packed with gawking parents who are there to watch “their kids”.

Chuck and I have yet to exchange words, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we’re watching football, grilling burgers and liberating POWs together. He’s probably just nervous about approaching me. I am, after all, pretty intimidating.

Fin

So that’s all I’ve got for the big update. Back to the mundane grind tomorrow. Thanks for reading. Drive home safely.