Six days after Ike, Houston is still pretty torn up. It’s strange to go about my normal business, more or less, and be surrounded by wreckage.

Tonight I came home after curfew (is that still on?) and man, it was dark out there. It’s like being out in the country, except you’re passing strip centers instead of cow pastures, and the tall buildings block out the stars.

I thought the curfew was just to cut down on looting, but it can be tough driving after dark. With many of the streetlights and traffic lights still out, trying to get through an unfamiliar area is dicey. The traffic-lights-turned-stop-signs aren’t flashing red*, they’re dark. On an unlit street. Sometimes they’re lying on the sidewalk.

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In my house! Internet in my house! Somewhat sluggish internet, to be sure, but still. Internet!

[Written Monday Sept. 15, 12:45 PM. Posted who knows when.]

As expected, we lost power early Saturday morning. My building was one of the lucky ones—we got it back midday Sunday. Even now, on Monday afternoon, much of Houston is still blacked out. Downtown is closed, a few major roads and freeways are underwater, and most businesses have yet to reopen. I drove around for half an hour this morning before I found an open Einstein’s Bagels*. I’m still on the hunt for that elusive combination of an open business that also has wireless internet access. My home internet is still down; the post I wrote early Saturday was the last bit of internet I’ve seen.

Ice is the hottest commodity in the city right now. Very few of the grocery stores that reopened yesterday afternoon had any, and the ones that got an overnight shipment are quickly running out. I went and stood in line at Kroger partly for kicks, and partly because I was out of cookies. They were on generator power, so they let about fifty people into the store at a time and lined everyone else up outside. When I got there the line was about a hundred people long, but it moved quickly, so that I only had to wait twenty minutes to get inside.

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In the face of an advancing storm, it’s generally a good idea to clear any items sitting around outside that might end up coming through your windows. If you have a good amount of patio furniture you can follow UH’s lead and pull it all into an interior hallway.

In a pinch, if you don’t have much extra room indoors, you can do what my apartment complex did and just pre-tump the furniture into the bushes before the wind gets a chance to.

The apartment folks also left everything in the open-topped dumpster (and the small appliances and other debris sitting near it) right where it was, i.e., next to my car. Even though the junk is inside a wooden enclosure, I’m not so thrilled about this plan.

In related news, the wind is supposed to increase steadily from now until 5 AM, when it will top out at a sustained 60-70 mph. John’s still fast asleep, lucky dog, but I’m thinking I might have to make mine up in naps tomorrow.

Lucky for me the power’s still on, so at least I have something to do besides sit in the dark and listen to the trees flop around. Most of the people in my apartment complex have stayed, it looks like, and a few of them have been sitting out in the outdoor-but-covered bit of the courtyard since dinnertime.

We’re definitely seeing rain now; I think it started around 10. I just found out on CNN that a curfew’s been ordered for Harris County from 7:00 tonight (as in five hours ago) to 6:00 Sunday morning. Who knew? I don’t think I’ve ever been under a daytime curfew before. I wonder how widespread the enforcement is. What if I go out in the rain, say into the street, but I PROMISE not to loot anything. Is that okay? Are newspeople exempt? What about ordinary citizens imitating newspeople?

I think I’m getting a little nauseated and headachey from anxiety, which I hadn’t expected, though maybe I should have. Not much to do for it but distract myself, so here I am. Man, it’s gonna suck if (when) we lose power and internet. We won’t even be able to follow the progress of the storm any more, beyond what we can see out the windows—we’ll have to read about it later.

Though really, since we don’t have TV and haven’t turned on the radio, we’ve been almost entirely unexposed to Ike-mania so far. We follow the radar pictures online and occasionally see what CNN’s deemed fit to announce, but I have yet to see a single slicker-clad reporter on a beach. In some ways I think we’re missing out on part of the cultural experience, but in others…meh. The storm itself is experience enough, regardless of any cutesy catchphrases the news stations invent.

Still no rain, but the wind has kicked up to a respectable level. I managed to get Sam to go poop already (he HATES rain and won’t go out in it)—a major victory.

Absolutely everything is closed now, so people are just wandering around outside to watch the bands of clouds roll by and chat with their neighbors. It’s disappointing that Ike will come ashore in the middle of the night, so that we won’t see the most exciting parts of it. If the eye is predicted to track over us, though, we’re setting an alarm. Seriously.

We took a walk along Buffalo Bayou earlier in the afternoon. It appeared to be up a foot or so already—probably the biggest sign we’ve seen on the ground yet that there’s anything more than a front coming through.

…and the power just blinked off twice. Ooooh, this doesn’t look good. I was hoping it would at least last until bedtime. Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a while, though.

Many non-essential businesses have closed, including our favorite tapioca tea place, which had shut down three hours before we got there last night. Argh. I mean, I knew the storm would be rough, but I didn’t think I’d have to get through it without those tasty tapioca balls.

Gas stations, too, are closing as they run out of gas, much as they did before Rita. I’d have thought, with more people staying put this time around, that the majority of the stations might still be open right up until the storm hit, but maybe they all operate so just-in-time-ly that *any* run on gas is enough to crash the system. I’m drawing my conclusions from an admittedly small sample size of the three gas stations I’ve observed, but surely that’s representative enough.

The weather here is still lovely—sun, blue skies, 82 degrees. If it weren’t for those scary satellite photos, we’d all be planning picnics this weekend.

I really hope the eye comes right over us. That’s not the best thing to wish for, I guess, but come on, how neat would that be? I’ve never been in the eye of a hurricane before. Supposedly it’s pretty amazing, right up until the eye wall smashes your roof in.

There’s not much left to do around here except sit and wait, so that’s what we’re doing. We’ll probably take a good walk later in the morning. Maybe I’ll go to the grocery store and take pictures of the empty shelves again—for some reason that fascinates me.

I woke up this morning to a radio broadcast of a press conference by Mayor White and Judge Emmett about Ike’s progress and the city’s plans. The gist was that yes, it looks like it’s coming straight for us, but everyone without special needs who does not live in one of the few zip codes under mandatory evacuation should shelter in place, dear God, SHELTER IN PLACE. By the way, we’ve been telling you for months to get your hurricane supplies ready, so it’s not our fault if you get to the store and there’s no bottled water left.

All indications are that this will be the worst direct hit on Houston since 1983′s Alicia, though it’s likely to cause less damage than piddly little Tropical Storm Allison, which stalled and dumped rain until people started drowning in elevators and parking garages, and keeping your hospital’s generators in the basement suddenly didn’t seem like a good idea any more.

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