Finally, it was the airport and getting into the concrete garage became quite a challenge too, as oppose to a normal business day. The concrete garages adjacent to terminals C, which was the biggest one in the airport belonging to the Continental Airline, was all filled up. Only choices were to get the first concrete parking garage available, David thought. His departure was supposed to be at terminal A, but after making two driving circles around the airport with "no vacancy" signs on both terminals A and C, he had to try terminal B. Terminal B parking garage was still accepting vehicles but it was approaching capacity as well. There was a warden directing traffic in front of it and when she walked a few steps forward to count how many more cars were still be able to come in to warn the cars afterwards not to wait in that line, a Honda Accord suddenly cut behind her and tried to merge into the line. She had to walk back and raved and shouted at the Honda driver for been such a jerk. But the Honda ignored her and continued into the garage.

Luckily David was able to squeeze into the terminal B garage following the line, but was only able to park at the top of the concrete building. He amused at the prospect of the poor Burrito House delivery car under the prospect of a hurricane. It was supposed to be flipped over and bump into other cars if parked in an outdoor garage on the ground, but now it seemed to be heading towards a fate of being thrown down from a six storey concrete garage and smashed completely. But there was no time to think about many other things, because all the radio news channels were already talking about flight cancellations while David was driving to the airport. Some radio news even rumored that IAH was going to be closed for all flights and advised Houstonians not to drive towards the airport.

Luckily, terminal B was not far from terminal A and David was able to walk to terminal B with reasonable ease after parking. Inside the terminals, many airline check-in counters anchored longer than usual lineups that winded like serpents. David again felt lucky that his ticket was with a relatively small airline American West. Other people with Delta, United or American Airline were apparently in much longer lineups even with the help of more ticket agents.

In David's lineup, there was a Hispanic couple in front of him, with the women being very pregnant. It was apparent the husband wanted his pregnant wife to get out of Houston at any cost, and therefore when he learned that each ticket to Phoenix, AZ would cost more than seven hundred dollars, he took out that much cash without hesitation. He explained that he didn't have a credit card and he was in restaurant business, and that was why he had many small bills. David usually likes to socialize with people with the opening remark of "oh, we practically work in the same business", because he had worked in so many businesses for so many employers. This time it was very true since he was working for the Burrito House, but he refrained from trying to say anything.

It was not an atmosphere for joking or socializing. He simply quietly waited for his turn to get a standby ticket to fly to Phoenix like every other American West passenger in the line. For American West, it was either Las Vegas or Phoenix, and it seemed no more standby tickets were available for Las Vegas and tickets to Phoenix were running out quickly also. Whenever the ticket agents at the counter appeared to make an error or had to pause to ask questions, they explained to customers that they were flown in from Phoenix to help out only that morning, therefore were not familiar with the system in Houston International Airport.

After getting his standby ticket and passing through security check, David arrived at the designated gate, waiting for the next available flight. One flight to Phoenix was boarding, but it was not likely he would be able to get in, because many other holders of standby tickets were ahead of him. Most of the ticket holders were like him, who was supposed to fly out in the following days either Friday or Saturday. But since both the radio and TV in Houston started announcing that the airport would be shutdown after that day, many people simply started swarming the airport. David's relatives including his wife and daughter pleaded for him to stay at the airport too, even if he could not get out of Houston. That way, at least they would know that he was staying in a concrete building.

Airline employees were doing their best to get people out of the city with help of fellow passengers. Passengers with small kids that were light enough to be held in parents' laps were asked to do just that to make room for fellow passengers with standby tickets. After being skipped one flight, David finally got lucky again to get on another flight to leave Houston. People appeared closer after a dramatic experience and talked more in flight than other times. Fellow business travelers compared how long it took for them to get from hotels to the airport. Invariably, the ride from downtown to the airport was prolonged even after taxi drivers, took many shortcut or trial routes. David was among the luckiest to make the usual 40 minutes drive in less than 3 hours.

When the flight arrived in Phoenix, it appeared all the chaos and striking scenes in Houston had suddenly disappeared. Except flashes of CNN headline news updates about people suffering heat stroke in Houston highways, Phoenix International airport looked no different from any other airports. After David took another flight from Phoenix to Seattle, all the Houston Rita evacuation sights seemed to be distant memory. David couldn't help but be amazed by such effect of today's means of transportations and thought it must not have been so easily for people to forget about the Exodus out of Egypt or the great retreat out of Dunkirk. How incredible it was that he flew out of middle of the suffering and hardship in just a few short hours?

When he finally arrived at home in Vancouver, Canada, he simply couldn't be happier. On Saturday, the Hurricane Rita finally made its touchdown at the border area of Texas and Mississippi with a force much less than originally predicted category 5. Cities large or small, including Houston and Galveston were both able to dodge a catastrophic disaster, that people with fragile nerves in the Gulf areas of 2005 could not bear.

Although it was still a disaster nevertheless for people in the affected areas, Rita did not register into many American's mind except for Houstonians because of the panic and large scale evacuation it caused. They were even casualties in a bus loaded with senior people heading to Dallas, due to gas explosion.

After the "Rita weekend", as David called it later, he resumed traveling back to Houston to fulfill contract duties with Burrito House and Bud Westwood. The project appeared to be on schedule and all that was left seemed to be switching the new system and giving it a period of parallel testing along with the old system before full deployment. Inside David's mind, he was not very optimistic about a new system being fully functioning as customer expected. It had been the reality of the customized software development projects, which the prospect of a quick "acceptance" was never great. And eventually, almost all software development contracts drag on for years for the buyers to sign acceptance because buyers would always find disagreements with software developers to accuse them of not delivering what had been agreed upon. Nord Kia project took a year to have its acceptance documents signed, and that was the only big project formally signed by any of the customers David had ever seen in his more than a decade of IT career. The problem usually was because one member on the software developer side, and it did not matter which member, in the course of the development project said something like: "Don't worry. You would be able to replace all your existing business functions in the old system". Later, the buyer side would argue that they had lost functionalities with the new system. And the developers would argue that the "lost functionality" was actually an inefficiency of the old system and there were no sense in carrying bugs from old system to the new and better systems. The arguments would usually drag on for years, while the buyer and seller of the software development services would continue to work, in a "give and take" fashion for years with both sides bad mouthing each other. Amongst the arguments, developers got more orders from the buyers and buyers would always try to milk out a week or two worth of free development out of developers.

To put everything in perspective, it is not hard to understand why it is so hard to see acceptance in the customized software development contracts. Among "wars" fought among nations in the 20th century, only World War II had a decisive outcome with two "Instruments of surrender", one in Europe and another in Asian-Pacific. World War I was commented by General Petain as "this isn't peace, this is a twenty year truth in" 1918 and the Second World War indeed broke out in 1939, not to mention other smaller wars or conflicts. It was widely joked among common Chinese that 谈到钱就不亲热了, and the phrase can not be more accurate when used to describe buyers and sellers of customized software development services.

Bud Westwood and Burrito house appeared to be very optimistic about a speedy acceptance though and David wasn't exactly sure whether they were just pretending or truly naïve about such a process.

But for now, fall was coming and the basketball season had started in all the NBA cities. David was just going to let good times roll, without worrying too much ahead. As promised, Terry invited David to watch a Rocket basketball game against the Clippers at the Toyota Center in Houston one day. It was a game awarded to David by Burrito House for restoring their email system from the unexpected thunderstorm happened after the UPS system was broken in summer. David picked a relatively week opponent for the Rockets, because he did not want to see Yao Ming lose, when watching in the arena. During the lengthy game, the conversation between David and Terry touched upon various topics with very little boundaries and restrictions.