Catch Up and Hurricane Ike

Well, I know it's been awhile since the blog has been updated, but we've had a lot going on: school started and swept us off our feet, Katy has played 2 football games already, were building a new house and now we are feeling the heat off Hurricane Ike!

I'll start at the top.

School started August 25. Matt is at Katy High School now co-teaching several history courses and coaching football. He really likes being on campus with the coaches and his football kids, and working with high school-aged kids, but I'm sure he misses all of us he left behind at the junior high! I know I miss spending 15 minutes of my conference everyday eating lunch with him. During football season sometimes that's all we would see each other! I have 150 news kiddos this year to adjust to and learn how to teach. They are a rowdy bunch! This is my first year teaching PreAP/GT math and I'm really liking it so far. They actually ask the question "Why?" and truly want to understand the curriculum and expand their knowledge. I also have 2 ESL classes and 1 co-teach special education class. They all have created their own personality- it's funny to see how each group of 12-year-olds can be completely different from the next. Cheerleading takes up my afternoons and we have our first football game to cheer at next Tuesday (provided Ike did not distroy those plans too). This is my second year with this group of girls and I'm really going to be sad to see them go in May. It's amazing to see how mature they have gotten in the year I have known them. They are only 8th graders now but they have become so much more independent! I'm so proud of them!

On a side note I think Cooper is really liking that he has the house to himself during the day while we are back to work. :)

Well, with school brings football, our favorite season! Between Katy, Texas A&M and several other high school and college teams we follow our weekends stay pretty busy. Katy's first game was against North Shore at their stadium in Galena Park. They are on a 70-game regular season winning streak and return several starting linemen. Katy lead the game 6-0 at the half but the tide turned and we ended up losing 10-6. Not bad against a Houston powerhouse and a team twice the size of us. Those boys were HUGE! The stadium there in Galena Park is fabulous- one of the best stadiums we have ever played in and the North Shore fans could not have been nicer to us. Katy's second game was against The Woodlands Highlanders at their new stadium in Shenandoah. (What's up with all of these new stadiums, seriously???) It was a long drive to and from the stadium, especially home. Katy lost that matchup 47-0. Our first shut-out since 1991. We just couldn't pull ourselves together on offense or defense and things got out of hand fast. On the bright side, this will hopefully wake up our boys to see the work they have ahead of them (Flower Mound Marcus, Beaumont WestBrook, and Cy-Bay, Florida before district starts) and we have a bye week this week for them to get their heads straight. We may be a young team coming off a state championship, but we still have work to do. Our next game is Saturday, September 20 against Flower Mound Marcus in Waco.

Update on the new house, they have raked the ground and built up the base to start pouring the foundation. This should begin sometime next week, thankfully after Hurricane Ike hit us. Pray that everything goes well and we are able to move in sometime in December.

Hurricane Ike. We heard at the beginning of last week that there was another new storm brewing in the gulf (first Eduardo, then Gustav, now Ike). We dodged the first two, but this one was looking like it was headed straight for the Texas coast. Well, the news was right and Ike made a direct hit on Houston Friday night. On Thursday they announced that school would be cancelled for Friday (you can imagine what a junior high is like when the kids find out a hurricane is headed this way and they won't have school one day- chaos. I did not think I would survive 9th period Thursday afternoon.) and all of the teachers in the t-shacks outside (yours truly) would need to take home all personal belongings and get all school-owned property inside. Do you know how long that takes! Classrooms hold huge amounts of materials, both owned by the teacher and the school, and we needed to take care of everything on our own, on top of getting our homes ready! Anyway, I managed to get everything inside and get out of there in time to hit the grocery store and the gas station. My kids were wonderful helping me box everything up, label all my boxes and deliver everything to random classrooms inside the building. Thank you boys!

After school on Thursday I headed across the street to our local Brookshire Brothers to stock up on dry foods. Close your eyes and imagine what a grocery store looks like the day before a hurricane- a lot like what a junior high looks like on a regular day. The bread was completely gone, the line was out the door (literally) and people were running around like it was the end of the earth. I held my cool (teaching gives you a lot of patience) got the things I needed (chips, ice, bottled water, batteries, beverages, dog food, cereal, etc) and headed to the end of the line. 35 minutes later I checked out and headed home to set up the house. Thank God I had already filled up my gas tank on Wednesday because that would not have been an option on Thursday without completely losing my mind! Matt was home (probably the first time that had happened since football started :) ) and we filled bathtubs, got flashlights ready, cleared the yard, stockpiled water and made all needed preparations for Ike. We ended up housing refugees (read- Matt's friends who still live at home and would rather ride the storm out with us than at home) so they started showing up Thursday afternoon.

Thursday night and all of Friday were clear until we lost power Friday night around 10pm. The wind started around 5pm, the rain started around 1am and it was a light sprinkle until about 3:30am Saturday morning. Then the storm came and hammered us pretty good until 7:30am. Fortunately for us our neighborhood was not hit hard and we did not have any trees down or windows broken. Our power came back on Saturday night (thank God) and we never lost water. We drove around town Saturday night to survey the damage. Matt's parents house was hit pretty hard. They lost 10 trees and what looks like a few branches off all the trees they have, but nothing on the house. The roads all had debris covering them and several street signs and stop lights were gone. Numerous fences around town were down and we saw a lot of people already working on roof damage Saturday afternoon. My parents house was fine, just a few branches around that the yard men could easily clean up. On TV they have been showing the damage around Houston, Galveston and the surrounding areas and we were very fortunate here in Katy. Downtown Houston was hit really hard, Galveston was ravaged and trees are down everywhere. Several thousand people are still without water and electricity and they are saying it could be days until those are restored in places. Thank you, thank you thank you God that we are all okay and nothing was damaged too badly.

I promise I will post more often from now on! Now, when will we go back to work???