Hurricanes: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The Good:
1. Everyone around here is saying this...We met our neighbors! It is amazing what happens when you have no fence. You meet those people on the other side of it that have lived there for 3 years. Donnie and Tami are now our firends and we have plans to go out to dinner together when life gets back to normal.
2. I went 10 days without spending any money! (Well, that's not quite true. I spent $10 on amoxicillin for Natalie's ear infection but I treid to treat it with what we had on hand for 4 days before that!) No Wal-Mart, no grocery store, no gas, no nothing. This, my friends, is the true reason for the "economic meltdown" that apparently took place while Houston was storm shocked.
The Bad:
1. No school for a week or longer. I can't imagine what kind of torturous schedule the nursing school faculty is going to devise for us to catch up after missing a week of school. Aiyiyi....
2. While we didn't sustain the huge damage that some people in our neighborhood did, we have soemthing that we will have to fix. And our deductible (this is what they do to you when you live in a hurricane prone area) is $4500. I'm hoping there is unseen damage to the roof. I want a new roof...
3. It just breaks my heart to see people's lives piled up on the street outside their homes. When you ceiling caves in during a storm it is just devestating. Insulation is wet and everywhere, drywall has to be ripped out, then there's carpet and carpet pad, light fixtures that fell out of the ceiling, stuffed animals, mattresses, it just goes on and on. There's a family around the corner from us with a daughter who is a ventilator dependent quadriplegic (think Christopher Reeve). Their house was decimated. The debris from inside covers the entire front of their house piled up about 3 trashbags high.
The Ugly:
1. Many people lost all the food in their refridgerators. Thus, the garbage that is out at the curb is horribly stinky. Trash bags upon trash bags of rotting food. I actually ran outside and yelled "Thank You" when the trash truck showed up on Wednesday.
2. The storm debris that is piled up along the street is absolutely incredible. Hopefully we'll see the trucks out picking it up in thenext couple days.
3. Things just smell weird. I think it is a combination of rotting vegetation from flooding, rotting food, rotting fences, toxic off gassing from the damaged petrochemical industry along the coast (maybe not that...). Then every once in a while I get a whiff of the frier going at the donut shop around the block. Now that is yummy!!!!!