Catchy Name Needed

OK so. Where to start. I am writing this on the new laptop, which is a, um, shiny new Dell of some sort... apparently it's an Inspiron 1420. I'm sure that means something to somebody. It has a 14" screen, I believe, and a dual processor and 3gb of memory and a 250gb hard drive, as I recall. Which actually means it should theoretically be faster than my desktop. I really know next to nothing about laptops, as far as security and so forth. I am on the hotel's network and it said it was unsecured and then it asked me for a password, so I am all confused about that. Is it secure? Not? (I suspect it's iffy so I am being a bit cautious about logging onto things.) Everybody is welcome to chime in on what I need to fix.

We were late leaving Bryan yesterday, and we spent most of the day getting out of Texas. You either have to go to Dallas, which is out of the way, or cut across country, and after some waffling about it we chose the latter. It turned out to be fairly fast, though. We may just have gotten lucky there. We hit I-45 and Highway 59 at various times, both of which go to Houston, and we saw whole convoys of electric trucks along with the stream of people returning home. When we stopped for lunch you could tell that nearly everybody was an evacuee, most of them going the opposite direction from us.

We spent the night last night at Arkadelphia... oh, that reminds me. I haven't read friendslists or anything yet, and I'm sure this is not news, but gas has seemingly been going up up up since we have been on the road. We paid maybe $3.59 or so in Bryan last Friday. Yesterday on the way out it didn't seem that much higher. Rob swears that when we first pulled into Arkadelphia last night they all said $3.80-something and by the time we came back out to go to dinner they had all changed their prices to $3.99. And outside of Nashville this afternoon we paid $4.09 and we saw higher prices than that some places. (We still figure it's going to be cheaper than paying last-minute prices on the airfare, though.)

Anyway, we stayed at the Hampton Inn at Arkadelphia, and we are also at the Hampton here. The one at Arkadelphia was much newer and nicer, although this one is ok. They both seem to have identical breakfast buffets, from what we could tell coming in. It was pretty decent, we thought.

Sorry this is a bit disjointed. I feel disjointed. Aside from just being tired from the travel, I woke up in the middle of the night last night worrying about whether we were going to have to clean mud or whatever out of the apartment and how bad it would be and how long it would take... and I finally got up and took another half an Ambien to shut my brain down. I am trying not to think too much about that, and succeeding, for the most part. There's no use in worrying about it - bear in mind that we don't even know that there was any water actually in the apartment at all. And there's still no phone service to Galveston so we can't ask.

My boss said that the big boss said that it would be at least a month before they called us back, they thought. (There was 4 feet of water in the bottom of our building at work, for one thing.). Rob finally talked to his boss today and he didn't seem to be saying that they would be going back any earlier than anybody else, which was what we were worried about. I was intending to go to Austin next weekend to the quilt show there, and if nothing happens to bring us home earlier than that we will probably just head back and keep those hotel reservations. We are not inclined to think we will want to stay in Ohio any longer than maybe the beginning of next week, anyway. (For one thing, the bed in Rob's parents' house hurts my back.)

This thing is not bad to type on. But I am not too crazy about the touchpad - I guess I'll get used to it - and it bugs me not having a number-pad because I use mine an awful lot. I am going to get a lot better about navigating with the keyboard, I suspect.