Friday Morning at Camp Tidbit

I’m having a breakfast of bread pudding and watching the morning news. After last night’s confident talk about the storm passing to our east, the reporters this morning are being vague again. I haven’t yet logged on to check the models to see just why their tone has changed. Hopefully they’re just trying to add a little drama to their broadcast.

Last night I made us a big bowl of garlic and parmesan risotto in which I cooked a bit of beef jerky for meat. It came out pretty good, with leftovers for today. We had some boxed lemon tarts for dessert. I have some camp food, but I’m trying to hold off on that until and unless we really need it. For now I can use a microwave and toaster oven. There’s even a crock pot here, which I wish I had known when I was packing. I also wish I had known there were no coffee mugs, Styrofoam cups or silverware. Oh well. I’ve been able to scrounge those few items that we need.

In case you’re wondering how I managed to overlook some really obvious basics, some of it was the stupidity that sets in when you haven’t slept well in a few days and have spent hours putting things in ziplocks, cutting open trash bags and taping them to things and putting tape and cardboard over the windows. You just get dumb after awhile. We also spent much of yesterday arguing over choice of shelter. The second-choice had all the things we don’t have here, but was inferior for post-storm and had no good interior rooms, although it had lots of windowless hallways. And finally, we didn’t do our last supply run. The missing items were on Dan’s list, but we decided at the last minute to just try to find a safe place for the car here so we would have transportation after the storm. The original plan called for Dan to go home with the punch list and get a ride back with a friend.

Plans change.

Well, if I have to do this again I’ll make better plans for the plans to change.

The news this morning is all about the tragic bus fire in Dallas and the traffic and lack of gas on the highways. It’s just like we speculated last night—opening up the traffic through Houston is great, but once you’re on those two-lane country roads with gas stations few and far between, what then?

There’s a lady being interviewed on TV. She’s claiming that she and a lot of other people are at a gas station in some country town where they have gas but are preventing her and others from buying. Sounds fishy to me. Why wouldn’t a gas station want to sell gas? There’s even someone saying this station has armed guards sending people away! WTF? Urban Texans are wonderful, generous people but some of those rednecks in the little towns just leave me baffled.

We’ve heard lots of good stories though, of people helping each other, bringing water for overheated cars, taking gas to people without. It’s good to hear there’s some sense in the world. People are being urged to do whatever they can for the stranded people, up to and including offering them shelter. Wow.

Tidbit and Pixel have settled into their new digs. They were pretty confused at first and Pixel was downright unhappy. But by the time I woke up in the wee hours of the morning, Tid was going to town, bouncing around on the rug and investigating everything. Pix finally decided to forgive us for manhandling him into the pet carrier—he crept onto our air mattress with us, curled up and went to sleep.

Now we’re just waiting for the rain to begin. Once it starts raining, we can be pretty confident of not being discovered. I can post more, use lights at night (for as long as we have them) and go down hall to the restroom more often. I’m looking forward to that one!

So look for another post from Camp Tidbit once it starts raining.