Ahh, word verification on now. Should not get any more spam.

This is my wife's grandparents' place. The tree in this picture is one of two that stood at the back of their property 100' or so from the back of the house. This tree splintered off midway up the trunk and fell exactly as you see it here. Inches from the house itself. 

We snapped this picture while playing "evade the random person following me in deserted Beaumont at 11:00 PM" I was driving through some residential neighborhoods when I spotted this display of nature's power. 

This is why everyone is going to hate my parents. The limbs you see in this pic haven't been dragged at all, this is how they fell. Notice that there is nothing closer to the house than the pile at the street. Oh, and in case you didn't know, this is exactly where you drag stuff like this when you want the large trash people to take it away. This will be laying there for a while, but my parents have ZERO limb dragging to do to clear their front yard. 

This is the bottom end of the tree you saw in the pic below. The slantways part used to be 50 or so feet in the air and was a main part of the trunk that is still standing vertically. Rita decided that this tree needed to be shorter. 

The back corner of Brian's parents house. This is one of two trees that met their final resting place on this house. We couldn't see much of whether these trees went all the way through the house, but it didn't appear so. This was the most severe damage that we saw to any of the houses we were there to inspect. 

This pic is of the general destruction that was present throughout Beaumont. This used to be a fairly substantial tree until Rita got ahold of it. This thing just splitered halfway up and fell into the yard. 

Oh yeah, I'll probably just tack these on as I think about them today and tomorrow.

I don't think some people realize what a close call it was for us with this hurricane. We in Atascocita all have power, never lost water and sure, gas is iffy, but it's slowly but surely coming in. For the most part, life in Atascocita is back to normal. Not 20 minutes from my house though, things drop off sharply. For those of you that know the local geography, my treck to Beaumont took me east on 1960. Once I passed Huffman, it was like someone hit a light switch. There is no power at all in the area, and in Liberty the National Guard has an 18-wheeler handing out ice to anyone that needs it. Sure, the destruction grows as you head east, but not that far from where life is mostly back to normal there arestretches of road where power poles are laid over almost touching the highway.

I was going to make a long post about my escapades "foraging" Beaumont last night, but I just received an email asking about my parents' whereabouts that covers most of it. I'll just copy and paste:

Mom and Dad are just fine in Baton Rouge with Pat and Henry. They
have Mawmaw in tow and are hunkered down comfortably at Pat and Henry's new
house.

They evacuated Beaumont last week in two cars with both of
their mothers. They went to Newton first to stay with some friends of Dad,
but Newton was forced to evacuate as well, so they went to some friends of
Nana's in (crap, I can't ever remember that town name, but one further
north). Nana is still with her friends in
Town-I-Can't-Remember.

I went to Beaumont last night to evacuate
their cats, so I was able to get a first-hand look at the damage. Their
neighbors are going to hate them. Not only did their house sustain no
damage, but the branches that fell in the front yard all fell in the exact spot
where they would need to be dragged for the large trash guys to haul them
away. Fifteen feet from the curb to the front of the house are completely
devoid of anything that might require dragging. The back of the house is
slightly different, with branches everywhere, but still nothing was
damaged. The trash can on the side of the house is still upright, two feet
from its normal spot, and Mom's bird bath is still in perfect condition in the
exact spot it's supposed to be.

Beaumont, on the other hand,
is pretty destroyed. To begin with, I had to sneak into the town because
the local police, State troopers and National Guard are blocking all the
exits. There are convoys of fifty or so large utility trucks driving too
and fro, and I was able to slip in between two of the trucks in a convoy and
exit the highway with them. There isn't major structural damage to the
town that I could see (windows and garage doors are smashed, but I don’t
remember any buildings knocked down), but there are about as many fences, trees
and power lines on the ground as there are standing. I actually had to
backtrack a bit through my parents' neighborhood because the way I was taking in
had a huge tree completely blocking the road.

If anyone's
interested, I took some pictures of some of it, but I have yet to go over how
well they came out.

Also, if you want to contact Mom and Dad, they
can still be reached at their home phone. Because they now use Vonage,
their home phone is set to forward to Mom's cell phone whenever their home phone
is down.