The Williams Family: Catch up!

I thought I would try to post regularly here, but of course I am hopelessly behind less than ten posts into my new blog. However, I have a legit reason for at least part of my absence.

Hurricane Ike came to visit. Chris and I stayed in Houston and rode out the storm because we were not in an evacuation zone. We set up a little makeshift bed in the hallway. We were in the living room until about 10 pm when our power went out and the wind was starting to get a little scary. A section of the gutter fell off our building and tried to hit our patio door but luckily the railing blocked it. But the noise was loud enough to scare us into the hall. So we sat in the hall with a flashlight (me reading Anderson Cooper's book) and Chris studying dental anatomy until about 6 in the morning. We locked the cats in the bathroom because I had a fear of the window breaking and them either falling or getting sucked out or getting hurt by glass/debris. The wind finally calmed enough by early morning hours that we felt comfortable going to bed.

Probably the most time we will ever spend in this hallway:

Our power came back on after about twelve hours (yay for living near the Chinese consulate!) but Comcast couldn't get their act together for another two weeks.

After that Chris has been insanely busy making up for the time lost post hurricane (school closed for almost a week and a half since so many people had no power). I have been working part time at Pier 1 while I search for a full time job. Post-Ike I had many many hours since other employees had no power or water or access to gasoline.

Overall, Chris and I were incredibly lucky to come out of the storm with very minor water damage to our property and nothing else.

Since then I have had job interview at Rice that I will hear about at the end of this week. It is by no means my dream job, but it would give me a lot of experience in some areas where my resume is currently lacking and hopefully open more opportunities in the future. And it gets me back in the world of East Asian studies which I like.

Chris goes to a conference in Memphis, Tennessee in a few weeks to present the research he did this summer. It is a great opportunity for him, but I know it is making him nervous to miss tests/school to do this. Here's a quick picture of the two of us at his white coat ceremony.

I'll leave you with some photos of the damage Ike did to our immediate area. The first shows the downed carports, broken trees, and lack of a fence our complex was left with.