beef, beef and more beef

We were really lucky - we hardly lost anything out of our freezer, mainly some ice cream. All of our beef products were in the top of our freezer, and even though we didn't lose any of it, it all was thawed by the time we got our generator on Sunday. Which means we have eaten a lot of beef over the last few days. Everything else in our freezer stayed frozen.

Saturday evening we had hamburgers, Sunday we also had burgers and fed burgers to some of our friends. Monday night we had steak. Tuesday we had burgers for lunch and tacos for dinner. Today (Wednesday) we had burgers for an early lunch (and finally finished off the burgers) and beef stroganoff for a late dinner (with Arby's in between). Right now I am cooking up the last 2 pounds of plain ground beef that we had in our freezer - one pound we will season for tacos and then both batches will go back into the freezer. Tomorrow we are having dinner with friends, but we will cook the pot roast we had in the freezer and will eat roast for the next few days after that.

One thing that is really interesting - a lot of people are getting their power back for a little while, but then losing power again. In fact, after getting our power back on Sunday night - the people across the street (and our friends a block and a half from us) lost power again Monday morning and didn't get it back until this morning. I actually have a constant fear that we will lose power again.

The good news is that a cool front came in Sunday evening and cooled things down here a bit and has really lowered the humidity level. The temp will start going up this weekend though (and the humidity level will go up as well), so we hope that everyone that has power is able to keep it and those that don't have it yet get it soon.

The bad news is that after about 12 hours of use by Justin's aunt and uncle, our generator stopped producing any power. The breaker is fine and everything else seems fine (the generator runs fine and burns gas) except that nothing is getting any juice when you hook it up. You would think that the generator should run for quite a bit longer than that - especially since we only used it for about 4 hours before getting our power back. We met Justin's aunt and uncle at Home Depot this afternoon and dropped off the generator to have it sent off for repairs. There are almost no generators in Houston so we didn't have the option to exchange it and we didn't want to return it because we have decided that having a generator is actually a really good idea. We hope that they are able to find some stupid little wiring problem that is easy to fix and we can get our generator back soon.

In the midst of all this, it is super easy to lose track of time. It really feels like the hurricane came 2 weeks ago, instead of just 5 days ago. It is also very easy to have no idea what day it is, since all the days seem to be running together. Sunday we didn't have church because the building had no power. The different community colleges that are part of the system I work for are closed for the week due to power outages and other damages. With nothing to differentiate one day from another, we have to keep asking each other "What day is it today?"