Posted 9:26 PM by Angie Schultz

Hurricane Homecoming

Got home just after midnight Wednesday morning. On the drive down from the airport we looked for (literal) signs of hurricane damage, but didn't see much.

Lighted signs -- plastic (I assume) panels lit from within by fluorescent bulbs -- are ubiquitous, which you don't really notice unless you're looking for them. Last November, when we were in Florida, I noticed that a lot of these signs were smashed, including the one at our hotel. To me, this is a sign of a bad neighborhood, and for a few seconds I was a little wary of staring at a hotel in such a crummy environment. But then I realized that the damage was the result of the hurricanes they'd had a couple months before. Once I figured that out, I noticed broken signs everywhere, even well inland.

So that's what we looked for on the way down from the airport, but we saw only one that had been damaged, and that might've happened at any time. We did see an intact sign which caused us to say, in unison, "Well, Halliburton's still standing."

In fact, we couldn't find any hurricane damage. We had to make stuff up. "Look! Hurricane crunched that traffic barrell, leaving the other twenty intact!" "Leaves in the road! Hurricane must've done that."

On the 22nd Niles went to the grocery store for provisions, in case we were forced to remain at home. By then the shelves were pretty much stripped bare. There was no water, so he bought juice. He was supposed to buy canned stew, or something else that we could eat cold if necessary, but much of that was gone, too. He brought home Campbell's cheddar cheese soup. (I tried this on broccoli once, hot; it was dire. I shudder to think of eating it cold. I'd have made Niles eat it.) There was no bread, so he brought back the nearest thing to it: taco shells, corn tortillas, chocolate chip muffins.

So on Wednesday night we went back to the store, to find it little better. There was no wheat bread, and the tomato selection was just terrible. I thought it was the End of Days. But today we went to Wal-Mart and everything was back to normal.