Like Scott Wells, I am fortunate that I do not live in a low-lying part of Houston. I, too, watched the weather prosthesis (a prosthesis is an artificial substitute for the real thing) and decided this morning about 10:00, that I would stay here and ride the hurricane out.

At that point, the landfall was predicted to be somewhere near Beaumont, which is about 90 miles from me. We had planned to go to Austin and stay with relatives there, but the panickers have turned all of the highways out of town into parking lots. Part of this is due to a lack of foresight on the part of the Texas Department of Travel Safety. If they had made certain that all construction on the evacuation routes had been halted, there would have been fewer bottlenecks to slow the traffic down. As it happens, the traffic is so bad that people have been using 3/4 of a tank of gas to get 15 miles in 8 hours. That sounds like an arithmetic problem from the fourth grade.

We topped off our tank a couple of days ago and have kept travel to a minimum. We have stocked up on water, food, sterno, batteries and dogs. The windows have been taped, and we are watching to see what happens. If the worst appears to be immanent, we have a secret escape route to Austin, so we can get to the relatives fairly easily.

Meanwhile, we have put all the loose stuff from the back yard into the garage, I'm culling out the key cups from the museum, and will load up tomorrow if it looks like we are going to get blown away.

I thank all of you for your well-wishes. The generosity of the people on this board is amazing. I have had offers for safe haven from as far away as London and Germany!

I'll post again when I know more.

Well, it is now midnight -- the cusp between Friday and Saturday. The winds and rain have hit the Texas-Louisiana border, but we have seen very little action here where I am. I'm located about 100 miles from the projected point at which the eye will travel over the land.

Hopefully, we will not lose power. We have plenty of food, water and lots of batteries, as well.

It is now 2:40 AM. We are getting some rain and wind from the storm. Power is still up (obviously!), and there are odd noises from things flapping about in the back yard -- from what I can see it is the odd small branch from one of our trees. One of the neighbors left his garbage can out, so it is sailing around the neighborhood. It's made of plastic, so it's not likely to cause any big problems.

It is now 3:36 PM. I had difficulty sleeping until I was reasonably certain that the storm center was going to pass well beside us. I learned about 5:00 AM that it was crossing at the Texas - Louisiana border. This put the center of the storm approximately 120 miles from where I live. We were most fortunate.

We survived the hurricane with no damage at all. The storm center stayed about 120 miles from us. There was some wind and rain, but no flooding and, as I said, no property damage.

There is no gasoline in Houston as I write this. I'm sure this will change by Monday.

The evacuation plan obviously has some flaws in it, but it did get Galveston, LaPorte, Texas City, Kemah and the other low-lying areas cleared out. So far, there has been no loss of life in any of those areas.

We did have an escape route planned that would have gotten us to Austin in about 6 hours. This is approximately twice the normal travel time. When we saw that the projected landfall was about 100 miles from us, we were fairly certain we could make it through. Had we gotten on the highway, no telling what the results would have been.

Maybe in the coming months, the local, state and federal governments can work out plans that will make more sense. We learned many lessons from Katrina. The loss of life during Rita was minimal compared to that of Katrina.

I am not belittling what happened to the folks in the bus from the nursing home in Bellaire. I used to live a few blocks from there. They were doing as planned, and had the bus not had the flat, all of those people would most likely have survived. There were also a few people who cracked under the pressure of the evacuation, as well as a police officer who had a heart attack while on duty.

We still have power, water, food and our families. And we are very thankful for them, and for the outpouring of good thoughts from our friends all over the world. We had offers for refuge from people in San Antonio, Austin, Boston, England and Germany.

And we appreciate all of them.