JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

pictures and stories from the water’s edge

JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools header image 2

Stormy news

September 23rd, 2005 · 1 Comment

Jenn of Mommy Needs Coffee, Blogher Mommyblogger extraordinaire, went to Houston to care for her mom who may be near the end of her life – and then she had to evacuate. Her husband has updated the blog, posting after battling traffic and running low on gas, she decided to return to her parents home in Houston.

Annie linked to a citizen journalist blog in Houston, chronicling how people are coping. The calm before:

We all deal with stress differently, My wife Cynthia deals with it by baking cookies and we were running desperately low on flour and brown sugar. It suited me to go have a look around as I am going a tad bit stir crazy. I was also hoping to find some gas while I was out as I would like to top off the tank. I found none but I now know that the universal sign for NO GAS is a plastic bag wrapped around the fuel nozzle. If you see that you know to keep driving.

I was happy to hear from New Orleans native Doctor Daisy when she posted a comment on my post. We met at Bloggercon II in Boston but I had lost her current blog. Look through her blog and read how she and her brother found their parents after Katrina. Now she’s blogging about Rita.

Nancy White has continued to share insight and resources along with lots of great links. I appreciated this post with excerpt from Houston volunteer badgerbag:

As I have been following blogs since Katrina, I have been thinking about the polarity of raw, torrential pain and the healing balm of kindness and optimism. Too much pain and we go numb. Too much “cheerleading” and we fall into hollow falseness. But both are part of the experience and, in my view, needed. For the most part, blogs have offered both.

Physician and friend Enoch Choi has been preparing to go help in the hurricane-affected areas during the first week of October. He’s been posting all kinds of information, especially from a medical perspective, on his blog.

Seattle physician Peter Pereira described a New Orleans evacuee patient he saw:

Without revealing any confidential information, all I can say is, she was an educated professional who tried to evacuate before the hurricane hit, but there was NO GAS LEFT IN THE CITY for her to fill her tank to drive her own car out. So she had to stay at home and weather the storm. When the flooding occurred, she SWAM to the freeway near her home, which was above the flood level, leaving her dog in the attic.

On the radio I heard that emergency officials here in Washington are recommending people in rural areas stock seven days of food and water. Katrina proved that help may not come quickly. Bainbridge isn’t as rural as some parts of the state, but if we lost the ferry and the bridge it could take a while for help to arrive. By the way, I don’t want to imagine what it would be like if we had to evacuate across our narrow highway. Already I have half of a huge cupboard filled with food and water, but perhaps we need more for our family of five. Organizing our neighborhood would be another place to begin, as this post by badgerbag reminded me.

Ted told me about Walter Mossberg’s column This is a Test of Emergency Power Systems describing crank radios and various charger: Then, pray you don’t have to use any of these things.



In the meantime, as I’m here in my home today, doing what can seem so mundane and routine, folding socks and scrubbing pots, I can pray for the many who are not safe or in their homes, for the many who would be happy to have such simple things like hot food and hugs from family.

Tags: Uncategorized

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 enoch choi // Sep 24, 2005 at 1:01 pm

    thanks for the love and prayers…

Leave a Comment