Two weeks after Hurricane Ike took out the power to 97% of CenterPoint Energy’s customers in Houston we returned home to find electric lights on at last.

Without power blog updates were tricky here so I’ll recap with the following picture:

As you can see the last two weeks was divided into four distinct phases:

    -The “water, crisps and donuts” phase - with no supplies in the house (as we had just moved in that day) and only a handful of gas stations open food was strictly limited to these new food groups.

    -The “Quizno’s subs” phase - with power restored to a gas station nearby the stores in the same block came back on and one was a sandwich shop chain. After a few days on crisps and donuts this was a big step forward.

    -The “life on a generator” phase - a week in and still no sign of power, there was nothing for it to buy a generator. With this we could at least run a light or two, power a TV (which had two or three stations available in special “snowy resolution” via its old-fashioned aerial). The good news was that we had no fans and couldn’t power the air-con so at night, with high temperature and humidity, we enjoy a nice sauna.

    -The “optimism fading” phase - As the number of customers without power was down to 20% or so we were beginning to think we would have get used to no power.

With nothing better to do whilst the power was out I tracked our feelings in a new so-called misery index, which ranged from 1 to 10 (with 10 being the most miserable). In addition, and to practice my Six-Sigma statistical analysis skills, I plotted the misery index against the number of customers without power, which gave the following result:

Now those of you familiar with statistics will recognise a close correlation (or relationship) between these two variables. Furthermore if we calculation the correlation coefficient (r) using the following equation:

we get -0.992 which is very close to 1 (positive or negative) and further proves the close correlation....

...Look, you’d be struggling to find something useful to do without electricity for two weeks!

Anyway, on Friday 26th of September CenterPoint trucks arrived in our neighbourhood to remove tree limbs from the lines and restore power (as shown in picture above) so things were promising but we’d been disappointed before.

The visit that night Minute Maid Park in Downtown Houston was a big morale boost for us (thanks Dave) and many Houstonians who saw the Astros beat the Atlanta Braves 5-4. I had so much popcorn I started to look like it:

Fireworks marked the end of the game, and official end of the season for the Astros since they hadn’t done quite enough to make it through to the playoffs and the available wildcard went to The Milwaukee Brewers that night:

But not as good as getting home to find your electricity is back on and the place is lit up like Blackpool in October...