update
Well, for those of you I haven't spoken with yet, I am here in Houston riding out Hurrican Rita. WE tried to leave yesterday and had to turn around. We drove 6 hours and had only gone 15 miles, our gas tank was half empty and there is no gas from here to Dallas so we would have never made it. After all that time it only took us 15 minutes to get back home once we turned around. It was extremely frustrating and disheartening. But i think we will be safe here. I am staying with my aunt and her subdivision doesn't have many trees and her house is mostly brick and pretty sturdy. The wind has already picked up and it is really grey outside so we can tell Rita is on her way but no rain yet. The storm is continuing to move slightly east and in fact, it is supposed to hit Port Arthur head on now, instead of Galveston, so it may not even be half as bad as they first anticipated. We are on the far north west side, Jersey Village if you're familiar with Houston, so we feel pretty safe. My cell phone is still working right now but the network is busy alot. It's been taking me up to 10tries just to get a call through without is saying all circuits busy. I'm just glad I'm not on the road anymore- it was absolutely crazy out there. I've never seen anything like it. Here in houston even there are people camped at gas stations because their cars have run out of gas and they can't go anywhere else so they're waiting it out at the stations. We've even passed dead livestock on the side of the road. There is a horse about a block away, that I'm guessing died of heat exhaustion during transit and the owner just dumped it- it's horrible. Today the only stores open were the liquor store and a little corner store, so my family of course hit up the liquor store. We've got hurrican mix and margarita mix so we're gonna have hurrican ritas! I'll post again after the storm has passed, if we still have power. Take care everyone!