update

A couple of things.

1) I have now, in violation of my diet, snarfed down a healthy portion of ice cream under the guise of cleaning out the freezer before the electricity goes. To be honest, though, it's fat free and made with Splenda, so it wasn't a huge splurge, and I got brain freeze before I could finish it, so my guilt level is almost non-existent.

2) the thing I most wanted to post last time was my ultimate point regarding the traffic jams. Katrina exposed how our country's emergency planning didn't consider the plight of the poor and immobile. Rita, I'm afraid, will expose how our country's emergency planning doesn't consider the weakness of a highly mobile citizenry. Basically, after 4 years of supposedly improving our country's defense and reaction to catastrophe, I think you can best sum it up as being catastrophic. All we're talking about is efficient and effective evacuation. Evacuation, for whatever the reason, is part of the most basic infrastructure of catastrophe planning.

3) I'm actually pretty impressed with Bill White, our mayor, who seems to be handling himself extremely well.

I will say that the final word has not come down as to the fate of the travelers on the highways. It may be that the promised gas tanks sent up and down the highway will actually get the stranded vehicles back on the road in time to escape the storm. The traffic may also clear out in time for those vehicles to get to safe ground before Nature uses them to play dice. If they're in the clear, then the evacuation was effective, just inconvenient. And quite frankly, in a catastrophe, I think we should be willing to put up with good enough.

Those are just my thoughts at the moment.