Who signed us up for this?!

Plywood:  $120

Screws:  $20

Extension Ladder:  $100

Sawhorses:  $40

Getting to paint "GO BRONCOS" on the side of your house:  Priceless

Yes, yes...we are preparing for Ike!  So many of you have been wanting to see some pictures of our house - so here you go! :-)...Not what you had in mind, yeah - us either! :-)  We really are hoping to post a "video tour" of our home here soon.  In the meantime, here are some pictures of our preparations for Ike:

It took us about 3 1/2 hours to figure out how to board up our house - fortunately the previous owners left boards for most of the windows so we only had a few we needed to improvise on.  Dan spent most of his day running from Home Depot to HEB (the grocery store here) to the bank while I was at work.  TAMUK closed as of 5pm today - so I got home and we got to work.  You can see on the back door in the fuzzy picture above (I didn't give the camera enough time to get used to the humidity outside...) - anyway, you can see our ghetto makeshift board for that door.  In between this and the next hurricane, we are hoping to get a board cut for that door and our front door, as well as some of the clips that our hurricane savvy neighbors have that help put the boards up much quicker and with no screws.  Eventually I think we will get hurricane shutters (as seen on the top window in the top picture here) on all of the upstairs windows - they close up with the turn of a knob inside the house.  The last picture above is our dining room...aka - the storage room for the patio furniture and grill.  I guess it's a good thing we haven't bought a kitchen table yet!

As for our plans - we are currently planning to stay in Corpus Christi.  We are going to watch to see what our friend Ike does over tonight and tomorrow morning.  Right now, it looks like the storm is turning very slightly to the north - which would put us on the "good" side of the hurricane.  If that continues to be the case, we will wait it out here.  If it looks like we will take either a direct hit or be on the right front quadrant of the storm (i.e., the worst side) - we will evacuate.  Dan has some friends from Purdue who live in San Antonio - and have graciously offered us a place to evacuate to.  After seeing that the storm was heading straight up Texas (i.e., to San Antonio) after making landfall - a colleague from school and I tried to book us a room in Laredo (west of here) and thought we were successful.  Until we went to print off a map and realized we booked rooms in Mexico.  Oops.  

We will do our best to at least post a quick note here to let you know if we do evacuate tomorrow.  In the meantime - please pray that we will discern the Spirit's leading should He tell us to evacuate.  Also pray for all who will be affected by this storm - even if we do not have a direct hit, someone will - and we are praying that somehow God would be glorified through His people in the aftermath of the landfall.

Blessings!