Lots has happened, but little that I wanted to happen.
A storm blew through north Houston Wednesday last week, and knocked out power to 250k households. My wife and I stayed in the house that night as CenterPoint claimed power would be restored by 2:00 AM. It was uncomfortable but bearable. When we awoke in the morning still without power, we packed up stuff to do and vacated the house and stayed at a restaurant with Wi-Fi and (some) AC until 3:00 PM. At that point we knew that power was going to be out for at least another day, so we headed to the other side of Houston where a friend took us in.
I worked remotely Friday, but that evening we drove back to our house to pick up more clothes and food from our pantry to take back with us. We expected to be at our friend's through the weekend and we could not really afford to eat out for every meal. Besides, by this point we knew the contents of our refrigerator and stand-up freezer were spoiled or spoiling and we would need to replace everything. I also went upstairs to get some books and it was well over 100 degrees up there - I was panting heavily when I came back down.
Late Saturday afternoon we received word from one of our neighbors that they had power again. Another friend drove by that night and sent of a photo showing out porch lights were on, confirming power. We did not drive back that night as we needed to let the AC cool the house, something that would take hours. The other reason was that we had moved a scheduled game on Sunday from our house to the place we were staying (our host was one of the players).
Sunday, after the game, the other players helped load up our car and we headed back home. When we got there, the house had cooled off but we could tell it was not done doing so. Neither of us went upstairs to check. By the end of Sunday almost everyone had power back in our neighborhood. The only exceptions were people out of town who had trees down that CenterPoint needs removed.
Monday we spent clearing out the refrigerator and part of the freezer of spoiled food. We stopped when our two trash cans were full and dragged them out to the corner for pickup on Wednesday (today) morning. I hope the trash guys did not hurt themselves.
On the plus side, our insurance has a rider for food lost due to power outage and approved our claim. It won't replace everything, but it will get us back to being functional in the kitchen. A roof inspector will come around later this week to check our roof. There shouldn't be any damage, but better safe than sorry.
Here are some pictures from down the street the next morning.
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