Update

For those of you following our ride through the storm - things are looking very bad for Galveston Island already... that is about an hour from us. The rain hasn't started yet at this point, but they are saying that the rain bands are going to be beginning to make their way across the city very soon.

We're about to cook dinner while we have power and enjoy a hot meal before things start looking bad in our area.

John has turned the AC down to 70 in preparation for the power going out in our area - he figured that at least when it goes out... we can have it as cold as possible in here. So I've had to go outside and thaw my body out several times today!

It does look like this is coming in at the worst possible place for our area, but that doesn't mean that John and I are in any danger. One thing the news media has been saying over and over again is that this is something that we haven't seen in our area in modern times. It's sort of like a cross between Hurricanes Carla and Alicia... which were 50 (Carla) and 25 (Alicia) years ago... not to mention that our house is only a year old - so we don't know exactly what to expect in terms of wind and/or flooding.

The only thing that does help us feel some relief is that we have a retention pond at the back of our neighborhood, and we have a pumping station on our street to help remove any built up waters.

The scary thing is that this will come in during the night - so if we lose power -we'll have no way of watching to see what is happening out there. So hopefully we won't lose power for quite some time and can monitor how things are happening.

We have heard that 10,000 people in our area (the Greater Houston area = several million people) have lost power already at this point... so we're thankful that we aren't in that group.