JustaBiker's Odyssey - the blog

Hurricane Rita… started as a simple storm, rapidly jumped to Category 5 and got massive evacuations started in Houston, has now dropped to a Category 3 and likely will just serve to as a dry run for what Houston needs to to ready for when the big one comes…

We are “hunkered down” (new vernacular of the hurricane region) in Spring, TX — about 85 miles north of the coast and about 35 miles north of downtown Houston. Winds have already started to pick up some, but the brunt of the storm should pass about 40 miles to the east of us. Its only 2pm now and we shouldn’t really start to see the real effects until about 2am  — according to the “experts” on TV.

Our main problem could one of those pesky tornados that flitter about the outer perimeter of these things and possibly some flooding from Willow or Spring Creeks if the thing stalls and stays around for a bit.

We have moved the contents out of Reneé’s closet (including 15 packing boxes of shoes — she says they weren’t ALL shoes), put in a mattress, flashlights, water, radio, etc are are pretty much set. Directly across the hall in my closet we setup a TV set to we can watch the news until we lose power.

We expect to lose power for 2–4 days starting around early Saturday afternoon — since power seems to go out periodically for no apparent reason anyway.

To the aquarium: we have a 200 gallon salt water tank with fish and coral. We have a small camping generator which will run the aquarium pumps when needed. The chiller crapped out last night to add to the excitement of this venture — the wires to the low pressure sensor had shorted and fried. Around midnight I emailed the owner of the company who built my chiller (in Ohio) and described the issue and the fact that I would rather be focused on other stuff at the moment.

The owner of the company called me this morning and described how I could bypass that circuit for now to get the chiller running while we figured out how to actually address the problem next week. So, I got the chiller back on line and the water temperature is now closing in on the correct range — and the fish have stop flipping me the finger as they swim by the front of the glass.

So.. we are mostly ready… we brought in all of the pool furniture, drained the pool about 15 inches to allow for flood water capture and basically removed all of the possible missiles from the back yard. Amazingly as I was working on the back yard, golfers were continuing to go, by apparently oblivious to an approaching hurricane…

We keep you posted… the main problem now is if we run out of Margaritas…