It’s been a while since I’ve done a Sunday (Evening) Post, and this one will be a catch up and shout to all those sending good wishes and prayers through the post during Hurricane Harvey.  We have been dealing with Harvey and his repercussions since August 24th, and today is September 3rd, the day before the Labor Day Holiday.  Many of our friends will be doing hard labor rather than holidaying, bailing out their houses (those who can even reach them), ripping up carpet and dragging dead limbs and sawed-up trees to the dumpsters and piles around town.  Our biggest problem here in northern Brazoria County has been flooding, flooding unseen before even in 1979 when Tropical Storm Claudette dumped 29 inches of our little town of Alvin in 24 hours. And of course, the huge Texas-sized mosquitoes are loving it.

My Better Half and I had started school at the local community college on the 21st.  He had met his students four times, I, two times.  Had we known we weren’t coming back for a while, we would have said more to them, but it wasn’t even raining on the 24th, and Harvey was the name of an invisible rabbit in a Broadway play/Jimmy Stewart movie. The rains began on Friday, the 25th, and as Paul Harvey used to say…”The rest is history.”

My beginning class at UHCL for the semester was postponed from the 30th of August to September 6th.  During this time, the TV became too stressful, and I turned to reading…mostly escape fiction. LOL

What I finished: All The Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (reviewed on this blog), The Star Place by Vicki Grove (reviewed recently), and The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman (to be reviewed soon).

What I continued to read: Our America by Filipe Fernandez-Armesto, a Latin American History of the United States.  I have to admit that the only non-fiction I read during this time were the Houston Chronicle and the Alvin Sun, once they were up and running again and the delivery to our flooded town could be resumed.

What I began: Steven King’s Wizard and Glass,fourth book of “The Dark Tower Series,” a book I had skipped and gone on to book five (skipped because I was intimidated by the 893 pages…I am now on page 491).  I have completed book five and book six, and will have to read King’s “catch-up pages” before going on to book seven, the final book in the series. My Better Half read them all in order and finished book seven during the storm. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz, loaned by a friend, has provided a good respite from “heavy reading” although pondering the meaning and secrets of the universe through the eyes of two fifteen year olds can be pretty demanding (in a good way).

And, I have cooked–creatively depending on substitutions during shortages when food trucks couldn’t get through.  One thing I WILL purchase soon is powdered milk. There still is no milk on the shelves in Alvin. Actually, instead of starving, we probably have gained weight, eating comfort foods and snacks several times a day.

I hope this finds my followers well, dry, and in their own homes–and READING!