Gesundheit Houston! Life in the Aftermath of Hurricane Ike

So I’m not one of those people who’s all “God bless this person and God bless that person.” It’s not really my style. Unless someone sneezes, and then I go to town with the “gesundheits” and “God bless you, and devil miss you’s.”

Aside from that though, I’m not sure I even believe in it all that much. ‘Cause why would God listen to us mere mortals on who to bless, after all? Especially those people on the news right before the hurricane who were all out in a field trying to pray Ike away.

Did they think God was going to be all, “Y’know what Houston? You’re right. What with the cockroaches and the heat and the demise of Astroworld, you people really have enough to deal with already. I’ll send the hurricane to Pensacola.”

But on the off chance that God does bless who I say: God bless that one lady who opened her Chinese restaurant on Memorial the day after Ike. She stayed up all night being blown around by a hurricane, got ready for work with no power at home and then OPENED at her restaurant so that we didn’t have to eat cold soup out of a can for dinner that night.

And God bless the people working sixteen hour days for the power company or in conjunction with the power company and the city workers who were fixing the streets.

Here’s the bed of a city pick up truck whose drivers were out repairing street signs:

Most people I know still don’t have power, and just buying the gas to be able to shop for food is a major undertaking. My friend Laurie and I waited 45 minutes in line for gas on Tuesday, and that was AFTER calling around to find out where the fastest lines would be.

Here’s one of the city guys next to his truck:

We asked truck-guy how him and the coworker can even get food if they’re working all day since they  don’t have time to wait in the lines.  And even if they had time to wait in the lines they'd still have to drive around hoping to find an open grocery store first. He more or less said they couldn’t and that they were subsisting on crackers and chips.

So when Laurie and I happened to find out that that her mom had some of those pod-meal-things, we chased down the truck guys and gave them a few.

I told my brother how happy they were to have semi-real food and he was all, “Of course they were happy! It’s not every day two beautiful women pull over their car to sympathize with you and then bring you a meal. It was a red letter day for them!”

Thanks to people like those truck-guys working their butts off, hopefully situations like this will be remedied soon:

Yes, that big ole’ branch is hanging on a power line over a busy boulevard by a little tiny twig the size of…I dunno…maybe my index finger?

So anyway, I know the economy’s going down the tubes and there’s an election and stuff, but just to remind you: it’s still HELL here for lots and lots of people in the fourth largest city in the United States.

My gal wants me to mention the tiger that was on the loose at Crystal Beach, but the situation there and in the areas around Galveston is just so very awful I can’t even talk about it on a silly blog like this. Even though I just did.