The worst part of Rita for me, besides all the trees we lost, was no power for 3 weeks. No fuel for generators. That was a nightmare. I've learned my lesson: Just because I live 45 miles from the coast, that buffer zone is nothing if a storm of that size comes right over the top of you.
See, and when that storm was coming, I was getting ready to boogie out of Clear Lake. I will not weather a storm even close to that size with my kids in the house. They will be scared enough- the last thing we need is a tree collapsing through the roof.
Before Rita hit, Mr. 94CougarGrad said, "Well, this house weathered Alicia, it can weather another Cat 3," and I politely informed him that if anything bigger than a tropical storm headed my way, HE could weather the storm in the house, but his kids, dog, cats, and wife would be with my folks in Round Rock hoping that he was okay. He finally saw it my way when we went to bed one night at 1:30 am with Rita a Cat 2 and I woke up four hours later and she'd jumped to a Cat 4. I packed up our precious things for two hours, then woke him up at 7:30 to the news. He said, "Okay, you're right." I took the precious things to our office (which at that time was in a cinderblock building, and we had a storage room on the 3rd floor with no windows), turned around and came home, and we were loaded up and on the sloooow road to Round Rock at 1pm.
On Thursday of that week, I had to be in Dallas to present at a seminar in front of about a hundred lawyers. We left Houston at 1 on Wed. and made it to RR at 8:30pm. I left the next morning for Dallas at 9 and got there by noon, then had to present at 2:30, and stayed up there until about 9pm. I was going to stay overnight with relatives, but Mr. 94CG got worried that I might get stuck in Dallas due to all the traffic all over the highways, so he asked me to come back. On the way back to RR, I listened to am radio reports about the storm, and a couple of deejays said they heard that the major gas pipeline that goes from Dallas to fuel the rest of Texas, including Houston, Austin, and San Antone, was going to be shut off in the event that the storm made landfall, which meant that NOBODY could get gas until the tankers came. So the entire way back to RR, I drove paranoidly, stopping about 3 times at gas stations to top off. That sucked.
