Rita Roars into the Gulf

Rita at Cat 5 Sept 22, uploaded by raprice.

On Monday, Sept 19, Hurricane Rita had not even entered the Gulf of Mexico. However, I began watching it for potential impact on my family and work.
At noon on Tuesday, Sept 20, I purchased a generator for the adoption agency, thinking Rita could be a Cat 1 or 2 storm at landfall near enough to Friendswood to put us out of power for a couple of days. I could ride out the storm but I would need to supply electricity to the agency email and workgroup server that agency staff coast to coast uses to communicate and conduct their work. When I got back with my purchase, I learned that local schools were closing and that Friendswood was under a mandatory evacuation order beginning noon on Thursday, Sept. 22. The storm was going to be too big for me to hunker down for a couple of days without power. We had to get out of dodge. (The red arrow in the photo points to Galveston Bay and the Friendswood area. This photo was taken during the day Wednesday.)
I activated family and work evacuation plans. We packed up irreplaceable items: Anne's handmade quilt, Jonathan's letters, Julia's and Becky's photo walls, Richard's Greek New Testatment. Anne also took critical school files. I packed up the agency's valuable electronic records (paper versions of current case files were headed to Spring, TX).
We were evacuating to Fort Worth for a stay with Scott and Julie Gray, long time friends from our days with Campus Crusade for Christ at Texas Christian University. Scott's computer business offered rack space for the agency server (essentially a high speed internet connection with a static IP address). Two bedrooms and a couch awaited us at their home. I wasn't going to wait for the mandatory evacuation order to take effect. I was leaving 18 hours early.