A pleasant way to spend an evening...

After watching Survivor, CSI and E.R., we turned on the evening news to watch the hurricane update, and one of the lead stories they had on there was about the gas shortage. They showed a gas station in downtown Dallas with horrifically long lines.

Which reminded P and I that all three of our vehicles were on E. And apparently a lot of the area around us was reminded too.

So we spent the next hour filling up all of our tanks. I only had to wait about ten minutes to fill up my Magnum at 7-11, which then promptly ran out of gas, but filling up the Honda was VERY problematic as the Chevron I went to had the credit card readers turned off and you had to give them a credit card (like a tab at a bar) to hold your place, then wait for the car in front of you to pay so they could reset the pump, and THEN come back in and pay. What a ridiculous system. That took me a good forty-five minutes.

At least everyone in line was in fairly good spirits...we were all joking about how we must have all been watching the evening news at the same time.

Anyway, the prediction is that gas will be $5/gallon by the end of the day tomorrow, so I am QUITE relieved that we have three full tanks of gas. I already told P that he's driving my company car wherever he goes tomorrow since I am at home so we can save the gas that we bought. We were planning on going to the lake this weekend, but not any more...we canceled when the people at the resort told us that they are being swamped with calls from Rita evacuees (we are lucky that we have a place to live) and also when the predictions about gas costs started coming in.

Like I said earlier, Rita is going to make life VERY interesting for Texas the next few weeks. I pray and hope that it's not as bad as Katrina. We sure do seem to be more prepared than New Orleans was, that's for sure, but if anyone has seen on the news how many oil drilling platforms are in Rita's path, not to mention the refineries, it's going to make gas prices ugly.

Dallas, in case anyone is wondering, is in the direct path of Rita, but the weathermen are predicting that it will probably be a tropical storm by the time it gets here...worst case, a Cat 1. Most likely, we'll have really heavy rains (which we need badly) and high winds. But the other effects of the hurricane are going to be non-weather related...we're talking massive amounts of people here, high gas prices, limited resources for food, etcetera.

And of course, my wonderful company has already gotten it together to put a COMMERCIAL on television advertising how prepared we are for Rita. I would prefer not to say which company it is, but trust me, if you saw it and heard how we are bringing in 200 adjusters to work the storm and have emergency operators on call all weekend, you know which company it is. And I'm one of those emergency operators since I'm on call all weekend. It should make life interesting!

(edited for content)

Okay, I have GOT to go to bed. I'm exhausted. Today has been emotionally draining!!!