A Little Help Please

OK everyone. I am to make 30 sack lunches by tomorrow. They are for the men from our ward who have been going around and helping people clean up in Galveston and the surrounding hardest hit areas. The lunches must not need refrigeration. I want to be sure it is as tasty, healthy, filling, and as economical as possible.

Can I please get some ideas from my peeps???

Also, I am making a salad and casserole for 45 people for Sunday. for Galveston ward members who are homeless. Any ideas on something yummy for them?

This is last minute but we have had so much going on lately.

Thanks for any help at all!!!

IKE has come and gone...the recap

Well, we are back in our home. We have power (don't want to be in south Texas in the summer without A/C), we have water and sewer service, and we are very fortunate to have far less damage and inconvenience than many in our area. We count ourselves as very blessed indeed.

Here are a few pictures and a bit of explanation:



We got things all boarded up to leave. With all the boards up it's pretty dark in the house. Our first day back we still had the boards up and the sun had been up for quite a while before we woke up...it was still dark as night inside.

We wanted to go as far west as we could to get out of the path of the storm. We were originally planning to go past San Antonio, but as we were getting close we decided San Antonio was far enough. We asked for a room with two queen-sized beds and a roll-away. We got a room with a king-sized bed and a roll-away. We had to be a bit more cozy than we wanted, but managed well enough. We had complimentary breakfast every morning, ate one big meal out each day, and snacked on stuff in our room. CNN and The Weather Channel were our media lifeblood.

We took Shadow to PetSmart the first day in San Antonio to get her cleaned up and smelling a lot prettier than she did. We tried to get her boarded at least for some of the daytime periods, but she needed a vaccine for something called Kennel Cough, which she didn't have, so PetSmart wouldn't put her in their kennel area. She did get her needed clean up though. The pet groomer said Shadow had a pretty quick snap at her at times, but when the blow dryer came on the blow dryer became the enemy and the groomer was her friend and comfort. Shadow got cleaned up and tolerable for the duration of our stay.

That's not to say we were spared entirely. We knew from previous evacuation experiences that dog farts are silent but deadly. We had to make use of the spray air freshener quite a bit.

Charlissa and I had Shadow in the Grand Am with us both to and from San Antonio, and our eyes were watering big time on a few occasions, particularly as we were within a few miles of home on the return trip. We opened the windows in the back of the car so she could get a snif of home, and the air coming in her nose at highway speed seemed to go right through her (yeah...eyes watering :-o).



Our neighbors kept us posted on what sort of damage we would see when we got home. Fences were down and a couple of spots on the roof with shingles missing.

As we were cleaning up there were a number of military cargo planes flying into Ellington Field (we kind of live in the landing pattern for the main runway). This picture doesn't really do justice to how big these planes really are. They were HUGE and coming in about every hour or every half hour for a while on Tuesday as we were cleaning. I'm sure they were bringing in much needed relief supplies.

Things cleaned up pretty well as you can see. We have two stacks of debris like the one you can see in this picture. The other one is on the other side of the driveway and is mostly garbage bags and extra wood stuff.

Like I say, we are pretty lucky. We'll get out some other pictures when we can, or you can see some of the more major storm damage on the news.

Holed up in San Antonio waiting for the BIG blow to pass

We managed to beat much of the rush to get out of Houston ahead of the storm. We finished up boarding up the house and moving things to high spots on top of tables early Thursday morning. We had set a target to be on the road by 5:00 AM, but that went by the wayside when we didn't get up until about 4:45. We took care of a few last things and were actually on the road by about 9:00, still ahead of the "mandatory" evacuees out of Galveston and League City. Surprisingly traffic between Houston and San Antonio at the time we were traveling was about normal, I guess. Certainly not packed with panic driven refugees. We got to San Antonio in about 4 hours which is about right for having to make pit stops and "dog" stops. Later this evening (8:30) I talked to one of the other refugees staying in the hotel who had just arrived from Lake Jackson (one of the coastal cities just south of Houston). She said the usual 4 hour trip for them took them about 8 hours. So, you can see we were pretty lucky to leave when we did.

Everyone is doing fine. Shadow can hardly believe the good fortune she has to be sleeping "with" people. She was laid out on the floor next to Chase competing with him for ownership of the sleeping bag. She didn't win, but she seems to be happy just to be sleeping on the floor among us all just the same. We're all getting really cozy in our one room hotel room. Karen's parents and our cousin/nephew Cherokee will be meeting up with us here at this hotel later, coming out of Victoria. There could be a couple more family members with them too. We'll see how many of us actually end up here at this hotel together soon.

The Weather Channel on TV and the different storm tracking websites on the internet are our lifeblood for now. Kind of better to watch from afar than be in the thick of it. We'll see how bad it gets. So far we may be a bit lucky and it kind of looks like the initial hype for the storm may be turning out to be far more than the reality of the storm. We're hoping for the best, but I think we are prepared for the worst if it does happen.

No pictures with this one, just words. Close your eyes and think of 5 people huddled in a one-room hotel room with a dog. You can imagine what you want to make it as entertaining or vivid as you want. If you want to add comments or share your vision of what you see with your eyes closed and thinking about us, we'll confirm or refute what we can as things go on.

EVACUATE

Well, Hurricane Ike is on it's way and we are getting the heck out of Dodge. It is predicted to come onland as a Category 4 Hurricane. Nothing we care to experience.

For those of you who love Jim Cantore we want you to know that he is in Galveston. Charlissa and I might go to see him before we evacuate. ; )

We have most of our windows boarded up and the things we want to pack in one area. We have done this before and have found that some things are still packed from our evacuation for Hurricane Rita.

You can reach us on our cell phones while we are on our "extended vacation".

We will post as we go.

Laura's Touch

See my beautiful new blog background?
Laura did it for me!
She is very skilled in computers and especially concerning blogs! She has saved my blogs several times and I am going to try very hard not to mess this one up again.
I did just notice that Laura is not in our picture even though she was at the baseball game with us so I am going to find a picture that has everyone in it. Then I will change the picture on our blog.