Catchy Name Needed

(Written earlier tonight)
We are at the Hampton Inn in Moline, Illinois, and there is no internet. There is supposed to be internet, but there is not. The front desk is extremely apologetic (especially since I am now a Hilton HHHonors silver member thanks to my frequent hotel stays) but there is no internet just the same, and they're not sure when it will be back. Sigh.

I got on WoW again before dinner, briefly, and it seemed to be working fine. Columbine, as usual, managed to find the answer even though he disavowed any knowledge of Windows Vista - he still knew where to look, or figured it out. (I had to left-click on the icon and click 'run as administrator' to get it to install correctly.)

I am going to have to post the entry I wrote yesterday - or maybe it was day before yesterday, I'm not sure - before I post this one so you will have the background about all the indecision about what route to take coming home. But we decided to take the more northern one. If we really had more time to screw around I would have gone all the way to Fargo, probably, because I am crazy, but this is about as far north as we are going. In case you are not all that up on your Illinois geography, Moline is one of the Quad Cities, across the river from Davenport, Iowa. You know last spring when they had all those floods? That was partially around here somewhere, I believe.

We went across Indiana and Illinois today, and made sort of a big circle around Chicago. Tomorrow we are going to drive ALL the way across Iowa and poke our noses into Nebraska before we start south. It's a long way to go just because I think I-55 is boring, isn't it? Well, I don't care.


Now it is 10:20 - at least if I have my time zones right, but I'm pretty sure I do because we are west of Chicago and I KNOW Chicago is Central - and the internet came back just about the time Col gave up on me showing up to play WoW and went to bed. Which is just as well under the circumstances but frustrating. We will have to try again tomorrow.

So let's see, what haven't I covered? It's rather difficult for me to remember right now. I applied for FEMA assistance yesterday morning (back at the Lima Panera Bread) and got an automated call from them last night saying we were approved for the hotel expenses - sort of frighteningly efficent, isn't it? We still have no real idea what is going on at home so we may try to find a place to use for a home base until we find out for sure whether our apartment is livable or not. We can have assistance for a month from the time of the storm - I think they said until October 14th. I think we were eligible for some other kind of reimbursement also but I forget what it was. Nothing big.

I am generally much better today, just mostly travel-weary. Regarding what I was stressing out about yesterday, my father-in-law correctly pointed out that if there had really been as much water in the vicinity of our apartments as my father was trying to imply there was, not only would my car have moved but the dumpster it was parked next to would have, too. Here is the satellite picture as linked from the Galveston paper:



The original is on flickr, and really gigantic, but if you blow it up all the way and look at the right spot, you can clearly see my car right where I left it, and the dumpster right where it was, too. So I think it is fairly unlikely that there was all that much water - at least not, you know, probably not six or eight feet or anything like that. That's not to say my apartment is not wet, but still. I am back to having hope. And I thumb my nose at my father.

(I put some annotations on the Flickr page, to give you an idea, if you're interested.)

Alright, they finally posted and said that there will be no classes for at least a week and normal clinical activities will not resume for at least two weeks. That's not to say they couldn't call us back earlier, but at least a week seems likely. So unless we hear something in the morning to stop us, we are probably headed to Ohio sometime tomorrow. We're just going to drive on up there and take our time (going, at least) and kill two birds with one stone. It doesn't sound like the power will be back on in Galveston any time soon and right now there's no water, either, so home isn't liveable even if everything turns out to be okay there. Hopefully they'll give us 48 hours on having to return and we can get back in that time if we really need to. (It's two loooong days or 3 shorter ones, from here to Ohio.)

We went to Wal-Mart and looked at the laptops and as usual with Wal-Mart and electronics, I got frustrated because they were all locked up and stomped out. We'll have to find a Best Buy somewhere, or maybe an Office Depot or something.

OK, well, here's what I just posted over at TUS:

We are safely in Bryan - a pretty long way inland, although they are expecting big winds and power outages here too. (We just made a expedition to Wal-Mart and they told the cashier while we were standing there that the store would be closed tomorrow.) The pictures of Galveston on the news are really scary-looking. The old-timers and the weather experts always say, "It's not the wind, it's the storm surge," and it sounds like that's correct this time.

The traffic was not too awful - nothing like Rita. Also, during Rita people were pretty hysterical even here and the grocery stores were stripped of all the bottled water and all that kind of thing. It's not at all like that this time - everybody in Galveston was really calm and here too, for the most part. (Although I gather that there are some people in Houston getting worked up about whether they OUGHT to be worried or not. Possibly with good reason.) 
 

We got here in less than five hours and we went by a roundabout route and made a couple of stops, so that's not too bad. I suspect that it would have been longer had we gone straight through Houston. (For those of you who know what I'm talking about, we took highway 6 around to 59, took 59 down to Rosenberg, and cut across to Hempstead on some highway I forget the number of - 379 or something like that. Then highway 6 again to Bryan.)

I am a hoarder of receipts. I keep all my debit card receipts at least until they've gone through the bank - longer if I think there's anything there that I might conceivably want to return - and I make most of my purchases with the debit card these days, so that means I keep practically everything. And I'm not at all good about going through and tossing them as often as I should. This morning I grabbed a handful off the bottom of the stack, and it turned out to go back to 2004. Then I have to go & get all nostalgic over the damn receipts, at least if they remind me of a dinner or even a shopping trip that I especially enjoyed.

( Too much detail )