Outside the Cone of Certainty

A little rain (very little). Some tree-bending (barely) wind. Smallish branches down. Electricity on all night. Air conditioning, although Rita’s certainly cooled things off.

Houston’s good dumb luck apparently will be the Golden Triangle’s (and New Orleans’) loss. Amazingly, we got through by phone at 7:30 a.m. to our mother on the far “dirty side” of the storm. She slept with her dog on the floor of her bathroom Friday night. Lost the cable, but not the electricity. It was still “bad” on Saturday morning, she reported, with 60-70 mph winds and driving rain. She’s anxiously watching the trees in the neighbors’ yards.

We had scoffed at 9 o’clock or so Friday night when we heard Frank Billingsley make what we thought was the premature declaration that the Houston area already had seen the worst of Rita. “I wanted to be the first to tell you,” he said. It’s still not outside the zone of certainty that Rita-spawned rains could dump 20 inches in our front yard, but at present it looks as if the Channel 2 weatherman was on the mark (first to tell you or not).