A Family Again

Mark is here! He arrived last night around 9:30. He hasn't made the trip to Rockwall as often as I have lately so he missed a few roads and had to wind around in the dark so he was very relieved to pull into the driveway. All the kids were so excited to see him and Shiloh went nuts when she saw the kids! I think she thought she'd died and gone to heaven in my parents back yard. This morning she was still acting crazy and Mark said, "you know what they say about people who drink salt water?" My parents have a salt water pool and Shiloh thinks it's just one big bowl of water for her. Hopefully she figures out real quickly that it's not really for her!

We're going up to the school in an hour or two just to check out the process of enrollment. The kids are now expressing some concern and I can't say that I blame them. It's hard to think about starting over in a place where you obviously know you won't be staying. But we got the phone call last night that our schools were "closed indefinitely" so until we know about our power it appears as if we'll be here awhile.

I found out yesterday that our power grid is supplied from a substation in Bridge City, which was flooded heavily by over 4 feet of salt water which does tremendous damage. So we've been told it could be 4-6 weeks before we get power back. I hope that's a very generous estimate so that we're all surprised when it comes back on much quicker than that.

Mark will be traveling back home later this week. He is supposed to preach on Sunday and he also feels very called to helping people in our area who received more damage to their homes than we did. I will be calling the insurance agency sometime today or tomorrow to file a claim on our car port. Mark said that he feels pretty confident the whole structure will have to come down in order to be repaired.

It was very strange for him last night watching the nightly news. He has not seen any coverage of the storm since it happened so he was just shocked by the damage in Galveston and parts of the coast that we have become so familiar with in the last year. He obviously knew our town looked rough but seeing the area where the eye went through just blows your mind.