My City Was Gone, But Not For Long

I got in the car to run some errands and go to the bank a couple of weeks ago, and – knowing I might be waiting in line a little while – I’d taken my MP3 player with me, which I don’t usually do if I’m just running the usual errands. My MP3 player pretty much stays on shuffle.

I plugged it in and started the car, and The Inmates’ 1981 version of The Standells’ “Dirty Water” started up. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

I’d go to check the weather online and type in my zip code and the next thing I’d see, on the pages with the weather forecast – ads for water damage restoration experts.

My auto insurance company has finally stopped sending me e-mails asking me if I need to get my car checked out since there has been severe flood damage in my area. No, thank you. I’m just fine.

I know there are people right here in Shelby County, and nearby, and up yonder a little ways, in just as desperate straits as people in Nashville and Middle Tennessee – and in some cases, maybe more. But still, overall – as a whole – we got off easy, here in Memphis, this time. The tornado warnings here that same weekend were pretty scary, but the last time we had a really bad storm like that, I saw debris on the street and trees pushed over dotting the landscape on my little route from here to Kroger. This time, the following Monday, I think I counted only one house that had some limbs on the curb. The north part of the county got slammed, and there were spots of bad flooding even here in the central city – but still, overall and as a whole, the majority of us, we were fine.

But you know, as far as the cities go – in a lot of ways, I’ll always be more connected to Nashville and Murfreesboro and Middle Tennessee than I ever have been to Memphis, even though I was born here and have a long history here and strong connections here, including having had strong family connections here. And probably more than I ever will be to Knoxville. Don’t really have any to Chattanooga, other than a family member living there for a while who no longer does.

But I spent some pretty crucial years in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, as well as a pretty significant number of days throughout childhood and my teen years.  My phone number started with 615 (back in ancient times before there were more than two area codes) for a good portion of the Eighties. It’s almost as much home to me as Northwest Tennessee is.

What a month it’s been. The week after the flood, I was kinda just feeling shellshocked, although I hadn’t actually DONE anything but sit here at the computer catching up on all the news in between periods of working. I kind of drifted off to Facebook for an evening on the following Monday, I think, and got into digging thru old high school photos various friends had posted, after having spent about 15 hours straight reading flood-related updates on Twitter and the Web. Feeling guilty the whole time, because I could get away from it all for a little bit while so many people I know couldn’t. Because they were right there in the middle of it.

Then I was committed to something work-wise from that Tuesday onward, and it was really the end of the week before I really had a chance at all to truly even attempt to catch up on what all had transpired since Monday and the big day of the flood. Couple being completely and totally swamped (no pun intended) with work with the fact that the fourth of the Christian-Newsom trials started that same Monday in Knoxville, which I would have liked to have been able to keep up with throughout the week but there just wasn’t enough time in the days to do so; checking on updates of online acquaintances who have been been dealing with a nightmarish tragedy of the non-flood type; and scrambling to put Band-Aid fixes on what I guess is just going to keep being an ongoing calamity of sorts here on the home front – even if I’d had four or five clones of myself, I’m not sure there would have been enough for me to go around.

So, the flood…

For the benefit of what few of you here reading don’t already read everyone else’s oft-more-updated and finer blogs in Nashville and in Tennessee, the Nashville flood finally got some national attention, though I’m not sure it really would have much if not for all the Tweeting and blogging there was about it. MSNBC was one of the first to give it decent air time, here and with another mention from Keith Olbermann that I think, in particular, was much appreciated by the community at large.

My buddy Travis Harmon – certainly the most successful of the bunch from that wide circle of friends from old ‘Boro and college days – and his comedy partner put out probably the best edition of Red State Update ever, and made me laugh (and laugh and laugh and laugh) and cry at the same time. Many of my personal friends and acquaintances up there have been volunteering their asses off all month, and continue to. I’m so proud to know all of them.

My mom – back in one of the few sectors of West Tennessee that mostly escaped both wind and flood damage almost completely last week – usually gets her faculty a little gift for Nurses Week every year. This year, she made donations in their names to one of the community relief organizations that WKRN had listed on their website instead of gifts. She said it just seemed like the right thing to do this year. I’m very proud of her too.

So many of my friends wrote great truly stuff that week. This was one of the very best, as was this post that led me to it. This was another one that particularly touched me. This angry one from one of our own forced to watch it all unfold from thousands of miles away clear across the country, expressing all the frustration pretty much all of us who still had power and Internet access were feeling that day. And pretty much everything over here all week long, but especially this one. I wish I could list more, and there are more I probably haven’t gotten around to seeing yet as I’m still (always) catching up. But they all outdid themselves on the writing thing that week, especially those many that were smack dab in the middle of it all.

Most everyone I know was okay and while many had flooded basements and such, overall everyone I know made it through and, most importantly, alive and uninjured. I’m thankful for that. I know everyone up there, though, has continued to be almost all exhausted beyond belief, though, mentally and physically.

I still have a little bit of a nagging worry – because I have known SO many people throughout my life from all over and have been fortunate to have made many friends throughout – that news has yet to turn up that won’t be as good. I think I’ve now accounted for most everyone I “need to know about” – if not directly, I’ve seen them Tweet or someone else mention them on Facebook or Twitter or on the phone – and have racked my brain all month long trying to figure out who hasn’t crossed my mind that should have by now.

One friend who didn’t get too lucky was an old college friend and ex-boyfriend who arrived home after a week in Chicago to find thousands of dollars’ worth of musical instruments, studio equipment and gear swimming in his basement. He was prepared for it, as his neighbor had been able to reach him by phone and warn him, and luckily the water damage was limited to the basement only – by about a half inch below the upstairs door. It was a too-close call for the rest of the house, but things could have certainly turned out much worse.

Unfortunately he got hit by a double whammy, though, as he still owns and rents out his mom’s old house in Bellevue, and it was nearly completely submerged. Last we spoke, which has been a while now, he still didn’t know where his renters had fled to, but presumably by now they’re probably some of the folks out there having to sift through and throw away most of the entire contents of the house. I know he sure wasn’t looking forward to the expected hassle forthcoming with his insurance company and was already preparing himself to be SOL.

Lots of teary moments that week, often over the oddest of photos, of all the many horrific ones that were hitting the Internet out of Nashville and Middle Tennessee. Lots of times just sitting there gaping, open-mouthed.

Highway 96 from Murfreesboro to Dickson was my usual route back and forth between college and home for me. Naturally, if I had five bucks for every time I was back and forth on I-24 between Murfreesboro and Nashville, whether going out downtown or going to work, I could have probably retired on that. I worked at Southern Hills, so you Middle Tennesseans know what my usual route to work was. To see that intersection in Franklin on 96, and those stretches of I-24, with cars and trucks nearly completely submerged – just surreal.

The (current) Opry House, which wasn’t very old when I attended a rock concert there in the garishly neon, New Wave, how-many-items-of-Esprit-clothing-do-you-have-in-your-closet days of 1983. My friends and I thought it would be a kick to get matching outfits made for the event, and – though they were each made of different colored material and design – we all showed up in matching camouflage miniskirts (with equally matching skinny ties) and just about every color of chunky neon jewelry you can imagine. I think we probably all looked like Catholic schoolgirls, except in camouflage instead of plaid – which I guess was unintentionally ironic, since we were from a small town in West Tennessee where dates on the weekend during duck and deer season ended at 8 pm, because your date had to go home and go to bed so they could get up at four in the morning and go shoot stuff.

So I was looking at the flood picture of the Opry stage that first week, and in my head seeing clearly what the stage looked like from the floor, standing in the third or fourth row in from the stage that night in 1983. Remembering that I was looking, basically, up – since I’m short anyway, but still, it was relatively high off the floor.

Realizing that that water I was looking at in the picture was quite a bit – a lot - higher than I am tall.

I wrote in a post that’s yet to be published that the Opryland Hotel’s what really did me in, sifting through pic after pic as I was early in the week. I know it’s silly, and I know they’ll repair it and build it back. It’s just seeing a place like that where you have a really strong, clear and special memory so devastated – that’s when it really hits home, when you’re having to watch like this from afar.

And speaking of home over here in West Tennessee… although I had heard and read about and seen some of the horrible devastation in Dyersburg, pictures that were forwarded to me of the flooding in Jackson struck it home even more.

Though things have progressed a great deal in many of the smaller towns, when you’re from Northwest Tennessee, Jackson’s a big hub – that’s where you go shopping for Christmas or your prom dress, that’s where you go to the orthodontist once a month, where people end up in the hospital when they have things more severe than the smaller ones can handle, where folks go to the doctor regularly – all those things. Many friends and old classmates live there. I lived there once briefly too, matter of fact.

The pictures from Jackson were as awful as the ones I’d been seeing out of Nashville and Middle Tennessee all week. A main stretch of road with vehicles as submerged as all those pics from I-24. A Sonic Drive-In with water up to the lighted menus, menus that are generally quite a bit higher than the bottom of your average car door’s window.

Virtually almost all of West Tennessee, as well as so much of Middle Tennessee, has now been declared a disaster area by the Federal government. Of my two little hometowns here in the West, one is in one of only maybe two or three counties in West Tennessee that were not. My other home county is.

I know a lot of people who were watching from other places on Twitter and Facebook and the like, and folks from other places reading Nashville and Tennessee bloggers’ blogs – and probably especially people who live in cities and areas that do experience such devastating flooding fairly often – maybe thought we’d all gone mad, overboard with it all.

But it just doesn’t happen here. Not like that.

Not but in a few pockets of the state (like up around Reelfoot Lake and off the Mississippi to the north), and certainly not like this. And absolutely not in this state’s largest cities.

Tornadoes – we know tornadoes, yep. We are all too familiar with tornadoes. Maybe not quite on the scale of, say, Kansas – but we know tornadoes.

Floods like the one earlier this month – they just don’t happen here. Not at all in Nashville since the 1970s – and bad though it was, that was really nothing compared to this one.

So yeah. Most of this state, except for those in the mountains in East Tennessee – we’re a little loopy right now, still. We’re better than we were, but things are still pretty bad for a lot of people down here. We’ll be okay, eventually.

But so much help is still needed, and will continue to be. It was heartbreaking a couple  of weeks or so ago to see one of my friends who’d gone out to volunteer and help Tweeting for more help, because apparently a lot of elderly people showed up at the location and she was only one of a few (if not the only) volunteer that showed up. I know a lot of major relief efforts went on all the following weekend after the flood, and I’m sure the larger ones have been more successful than that one was. I hope not too many of the smaller ones had problems like that one did.

It’ll be a long ongoing process for a long time, and daunting. In Nashville, the potential economic repercussions alone are a little bit terrifying. Not only are many of Nashville’s biggest landmarks and tourist attractions, and other large industries, going to be under repair for some time – some of the largest are out of commission for possibly the rest of the year at the very least, and literally thousands of people are about to be (or already are) without jobs.

And the same goes for other places in Tennessee, with varying degrees of what and how much those counties are going to be hit economically. In a state that has already been struggling with disastrous state budgetary issues, widespread unemployment, and general economic downturn statewide for some time now – it’s no wonder if everyone’s holding their breath to see where we go from here.

Some resources for those who want to help (many of these are also aggregating efforts for other Middle TN counties as well):

• The United Way of Metropolitan Nashville – you can also text RESTORE to UNITED (864833) to give $10 to help victims of the Nashville flood.
• Hands On Nashville – also in the process of major relief efforts for Nashville
• DonateNashville.org - a Craigslist-type resource recently put together by The United Way of Metro Nashville and Cool People Care to more efficiently organize directly what people need and what people have
• The Red Cross – you can also donate $10 to the Red Cross to help the flood victims by texting REDCROSS to 90999
• Cool People Care also has some great “We Are Nashville” t-shirts for sale with proceeds going to help flood victims

Speak to Power has put together some listings of resources for help, donations and more in several of the worst hit counties in West Tennessee also:

• Dyersburg – Dyer County Relief & Donation Resources
• Tipton County Relief & Donation Resources
• Shelby County – Millington Relief & Donation Resources
  

My hat’s truly off to Christy and Morgan (and anyone else helping behind the scenes that week) at The Nashvillest, who did an outstanding job of collecting, organizing and getting information out on the Web through this whole ordeal that week and just really became the central point of Internet communication regarding the Nashville flood and continue to be. I should point out, too, that the website is not their job – they have full-time jobs elsewhere – yet they still managed to kinda outshine the local print and television news media when it came to the WWW. The local media still did a good job and continues to, but in this situation, they kinda got pwned as far as getting critical information out on the Internet goes.

(Sadly The Tennesseean‘s website, though better than it was in the past, is kind of a great big cluttered mess and I really don’t know how anyone finds anything on there. Messy, messy, messy. I’m not a big fan of the Scripps template that The Commercial Appeal and the Knoxville News-Sentinel are using these days, but it’s 110% better than the garbled cluttered up mess I see every time I go to The Tennesseean looking for something. And while I know newspaper and television news sites pretty much MUST have ads on them these days, and that’s fine – it’d be nice if someone would come up with a solution for nearly all of the media sites nationwide where advertisements wouldn’t cause the page loading issues they do. There’s nothing more annoying than going to your local TV news station’s site when the tornado siren’s going off outdoors… only to see the page hanging FOREVER when it’s trying to load via some ad supplier’s domain.)

Anyway, so there. I would say that’s all, but yesterday the floods came back and a little too close to home for me – way too close to home for many of my friends.

Summer hasn’t even really begun in Tennessee and, this year, I don’t think winter can come too soon.

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On a final note – I’m going to make a valiant attempt to start posting again at least a few times a week, if not more. Even if it’s stupid. I’ve been so busy for so many months now and it really has been almost impossible to get here and post most of the time. But I feel better when I do, so I’m going to make an effort again and guess we’ll just see what happens. I’ve decided it wasn’t just because the week of the flood was so grim and critical – it just felt better, being on Twitter more, being here more. So there you go. It might get really dumb around here, but I guess that’s okay too.

If Tennessee Floated Away, Would The Other 49 States Notice? (Bizarro World Weather, Nashville Waterworld, and the Tennessee Complex)

We interrupt this (really mostly unplanned) posting moratorium ‘cos I just wanna say, WTF?

Having survived Hurricane Elvis, the Great Ice Storm of 1994, and – even more up close and personal than I like to think about very often – the 2003 tornado that tried to eradicate Jackson from the planet, there’s not much about natural disasters that comes as a surprise anymore. I’ve seen lots of crazy whacked out weather down here.

But this weekend was like Bizarro World Weather down here. In almost 22 years of living in the same house (and a hop, skip and jump from the same tornado siren at the fairgrounds), I am pretty certain I have never heard that thing go off five (at least five, it might have been six) times in a 24-hour period. And I’m absolutely certain I’ve never heard it blare for TWO HOURS (could have been three, definitely two). Having really only fairly recently gotten to where I’m not practically hyperventilating and paralyzed anymore when the thing goes off, it was better than it would have been a year or so ago, but still – decidedly on edge for a very long period of time.

At the time of that two or more hour siren, they were also evacuating the thousands of folks down at the Beale Street Music Festival (i.e., MudFest) on Saturday night. And then last night, people in the crowd were acting like jerks and booing when headliner Three Doors Down had to be canceled and couldn’t make it down here because they were having trouble getting from Nashville to Memphis, because of the flooded mess this state is right now. Nashvillians John Hiatt and Alison Krauss’ BSMF sets were also canceled due to the flood situation, as was a Dierks Bentley show in Knoxville on Sunday night, seeing as how Bentley was in his flooded basement with a bucket just like most everyone else in Nashville. (Why the Beale Street Music Festival hasn’t yet been moved to a different weekend in May after all these years is beyond me, since it almost always rains and storms that weekend, and either doesn’t rain at all or hardly rains the rest of the weekends in May. Seriously.)

And while things are fine right here where I am in the center of the city, they definitely are NOT around the whole region in general. It was kinda bad enough in Memphis and Arkansas and North Mississippi, with all the flooding (in places I’ve never seen flood before) and storm damages and, sadly, several deaths. The tornadoes that did come through (mostly hitting the more rural areas) were terrible with horrific damage – but the rain itself just gutted the entire Mid-South. It just kept on coming down, and coming back again and again, and it wouldn’t go away.

And Nashville, poor Nashville, is practically totally under water and now the Cumberland, which was 19 feet on Friday, has a flood stage of 40 feet, and was currently 55 feet last I looked at the news – the river’s on the verge of completely swallowing up downtown Nashville. I spent most of Sunday reading friends mentioning that co-workers had had to abandon their homes, neighbors had totally lost their homes, just about everyone I know up there has water in their basement (and rising in many places), and many of my friends discovered on Sunday that they now own lakefront property all of a sudden.

I saw a photo snapped not far from where an ex-BF used to live used to be (officially I never lived there but technically I did), and at first I thought well, we’d have been all right probably because the living space was actually on the second floor. Then I remembered how small the building was and how low those ceilings were. If this had happened 23 years ago, we’d have been like those other people clinging to their roofs or the top of their vehicles waiting to be rescued. (Consequently, that same ex moved back to Nashville a few years ago and texted me last night, lamenting the thousands of dollars in musical instruments, equipment and other gear currently swimming around his basement – according to his neighbor, that is. He was in Chicago this weekend, so he hasn’t yet seen it for himself.)

And it’s not just Nashville. One of my two little hometowns an hour to the west is being besieged by an overflowing Big Sandy River (and though I haven’t seen photos, I’m sure the Tennessee River is flooding the other end of county at the beach and beyond), and judging from the conditions in this photo that was sent to me in e-mail last night:

… if I was still in high school, I would have had to had a boat to get there on Monday morning. That building in the photo is NOT “out in the sticks” out in the county – it’s very much inside the city limits – and really isn’t all THAT close to the river in question, so presumably nearly every business on that side of town was fighting the same watery madness.

Most things south of Nashville in Middle Tennessee are apparently a wreck as well, including this house. She was supposed to leave for NYC in three weeks, they have no renter’s insurance, and they’ve lost everything.

Levees are leaking and breaking all over, sinkholes are developing everywhere (including still in West Tennessee as well as Middle Tennessee), people and animals are stranded, drowning. So many roads closed and it’s bad all over, but Nashville itself has kinda turned into one gigantic lake with thousands of little islands around.

I am old enough that I vaguely remember the major flood Nashville had in the 1970s, but that was nothing compared to this. There are places up there that have never been under water in my lifetime – or probably for hundreds of years, or ever. It’s just stunning.

All of this coupled with the fact that three members of my family were in Nashville on Saturday – and had already planned to stay in a hotel overnight (good thing) – but trying to get them out of there Sunday was a bit daunting, especially when – after hearing road after road after road was closed or closing, and downtown was closed in all kinds of places and flooding, and most especially when authorities up there were practically begging people not to drive, all of which I was texting with every new closure or warning I read about – after encouraging them to stay put, they left anyway. They couldn’t go what would be the usual route back on I-40 West (we already knew the main highway off the interstate was marked as flooded by the Highway Patrol, and knew most of the other alternatives were probably little better.)

It took them a while to get through downtown, but once they made it to I-65 North, things were okay to Clarksville and beyond. But I pretty much held my breath until I knew they’d gotten out of Nashville, and still until I knew they’d made it home.

And Nashville, poor Nashville – later Sunday morning, friends and others were Tweeting that the waters in their basement were starting to recede. And then around noonish – just like the weather and news folks had said it would – the rain and sirens and everything else started up again.

People are going to need serious help to put Nashville and Middle Tennessee back together again. It’s such a mess, but you probably heard that already.

Or maybe you didn’t – because apparently much of the national news has mostly ignored what’s happening in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, as well as the rest of the damage in West Tennessee and our neighboring states. Little blips here and there, but you know, it’s not like when some other cities have gotten decimated by Mother Nature and you can’t get away from it on the news and in your newspaper, no matter where you are.

And it’s kinda doubly puzzling because some of those cities I can think of that have had their disasters plastered on TV and other media for days at a time – the hurricanes and floods and such that have happened in those places, they happen fairly often. What’s happening in Nashville right now has never happened in my lifetime (and I’m getting kinda old, you know) – we have some rural flood zones with relatively small area dotting the state, but a national emergency-type flood of this proportion is just unheard of.

It’s kinda like the (cough) “straight line wind” storm dubbed Hurricane Elvis that paralyzed Memphis for weeks in 2003 – I recall one of our city officials commenting at the time that a hurricane that wound up not even materializing and hitting one coastal city got more national coverage than Hurricane Elvis did. People died, the city was in pieces (including parts of the city that had never or rarely seen such kinds of damage), the whole city was mostly without power in 90+ degree weather for weeks – yet unless you lived fairly close by, you probably had no idea what was going on down here.

What, do we (Tennessee in general) need to switch deodorants or something? At this point – and after this many crises that have gone mostly ignored – it’s enough to give an entire state a complex.

Aunt B. writes about the current situation and similarly puzzling lack of interest here and here, and the fine folks at The Nashvillest have done a stand-up job gathering and providing information during this awful time up there. Honestly, The Nashvillest and Twitter, as well as the Internet in general, have become invaluable resources for sure time and time again, and kept a lot of folks in the loop and informed that would have otherwise not been.

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And finally – yes, there was supposed to be an Alex Chilton post in March and no, you weren’t imagining things. As I kinda said the day I posted the last one (about Doug Fieger), the Alex post was nagging at me so much it was going to make me sick if I didn’t post it that day – and then I never posted it. Because I haven’t finished it. Because for some reason, I can’t. There’s a personal piece to that post that I’m struggling with – maybe it’s because I’ve told the story many times before, but this will probably be the last time I ever tell it. Maybe I’ll finish it and post it soon. Stay tuned.

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EDITED TO ADD: What a beautiful and horrific photo at the same time @brittneyg‘s place:

Nashville Submerged

About This Insane Weather

I’m so cold.

That is all.

Good, Bad, More Bad, and Even More Good

So now that I’ve got all the other out of the way, a little post about things good and bad, but neither of which have anything to do with how poor I am or Michael Jackson.

Bad - the heat. My car registered 107 degrees the other day. I think it got down to 105 by the time I got from Kroger back to the house. The heat index was 113 that same day. It’s been like this for about a week and is not supposed to break at all until after Tuesday – there’s two spots of rain in the forecast between then and now, but I don’t have much hope it’s really going to happen (it’s rained in Nashville and Knoxville a couple of times the past week or so, but not a drop here). I have been in discussions online on and off with friends from all over the country (and the world, for that matter) this past week and I don’t care how cold you are or how sick of rain you are – I’ll trade. Immediately.

More Bad – Little has had another bout of old age vestibular disease this week, which some may recall this time last year I was dealing with that with both her and Dobie at almost the same time. Dobie’s was much more pronounced and took a much longer time for recovery; with her, once again by the next day she was better and is continuing to do better. She’s a 17 or 18 year old cat (I can never remember which year she arrived as a baby) so these things are to be expected, but it’s like a stroke and it’s so frightening and unnerving – I think even more so with cats, since they like to get in higher places and the first couple of days she flatly tossed herself off her perch and scared me to death. But she is much better now. I am starting to wonder if this is heat-related, though I read a pretty voluminous amount of information on the syndrome last year (both canine and feline related) and don’t recall any mention of that.

Good - my Rite Aid box fan. I’d forgotten about that thing. I bought it a few years ago when the AC went out and was having to be replaced. After several days of the above heat already come this past Tuesday, and then reading that it wasn’t going to break at all until maybe next Wednesday, I thought I was probably going to be suicidal come the weekend. I have air, but my window unit that usually does a pretty decent job in the summertime just can’t handle this kind of heat and for this extended a period.

Then I remembered the box fan. I would have NEVER guessed it would make the difference it has, but it has. Granted, really over here in my one little corner in the room with the computer and Internet, but that’s where I am almost all the time anyway. In the afternoon after noon or 1:00 or so, it’s still getting a little stuffy in here – but NOTHING like the completely intolerable horrific awful heat it was before I got the fan out. Much, MUCH better. And I’ve even been COLD sometimes in the early mornings or middle of the night this week and had to turn it off. Rock!!!

Even More Good – In their old age, and especially as Dobie’s health went into the serious decline it did the last year or so of his life, Dobie and Lulu both developed some incontinence problems – especially Dobie. Though it’s still very hard to believe he’s gone and makes me sad, one kind of unexpected plus has popped up since his passing – even though they turned five years old last month, I really had no idea that the young’ns are as well house trained as they apparently are! They’re not perfect – with me living alone and my sleeping schedule being all out of whack and not really a schedule, on the off chance I actually do sleep a whole lot and probably more than I should instead of my usual three or four hour catnaps here and there, occasionally there’s an accident, but rarely. They are, for all practical purposes, beautifully housetrained! Daisy doesn’t surprise me because she’s perfect anyway (heh), but it is kind of shocking to me just how well her brothers are.

On the one hand, it’s a pleasant surprise to discover just how really well trained that way they are when, with them, I never really did even try all that hard when they were very young because I was still working out of the house and not here a lot.  On the other hand, that makes Dobie’s frequent accidents (even long before he ever got sick) a little frustrating seeing as how I DID make an effort with him when he was young. Go figure.

In any case, hope everyone has a great weekend! I have been so pitifully socially deprived working around the clock so much, I’m really looking forward to meeting up with KathyT and Melissa on Sunday, so more on that later in the weekend or Monday, I’m sure.

Twitter Twisters

So, here I sit on the western side of the state, where there hasn’t been a raindrop all day, once yet again witnessing on Twitter while all my friends in Nashville are Tweeting about the tornadoes/storms/whatever coming through there once yet again. Deja vu.

Of course, we just had our own little dance with straight line winds last Friday that took out a good bit of Memphis greenery, and again on Sunday. I had not gotten out of the house since before the weekend, and was quite shocked yesterday to discover a tree about the size of my house fully uprooted and laying in the yard of someone’s home around the corner from me and about six or seven houses down, not to mention the landscape dotted with trees through roofs of various houses on my route to the grocery store. There wasn’t, like, this massive and constant scene of destruction like with Hurricane Elvis or the infamous ice storm of ’94, but there was at least one house on every street between my house and Kroger that had (or had had) a tree stuck in its roof.

As for Middle Tennessee, the wrath of Mother Nature is still winding its way through and I’m watching various friends Tweeting and checking in either to say everything’s okay, or they’re headed for cover, or it’s passed and look at this poor demolished tree in Aunt B.’s yard. (She’s more upset about the power being out, though, as would I be – it’s frickin’ hot down here for June right now.)

I don’t know what’s worse – being smack in the middle of one, or watching like this from afar when people you care about could be in danger. Well, I do know what’s worse, but they’re both pretty bad. My mom can probably relate to the latter – I’m sure the 15-20 minutes or so between the first call and my second call to her wasn’t fun the night I got stuck in one of Tennessee’s most severe tornadoes of all time. First I called her from the interstate to ask if they were saying on TV there was a tornado warning; 20 minutes or so later, I was calling back to report I was okay, save for my tornado-pummeled and totaled car with the completely cracked windshield.

I did agree with a commenter somewhere or another on one of the Memphis media sites that it was rather laughable how the tornado sirens in the center city went off AFTER the storm had passed through on Friday.

Glancing at Twitter again. Aunt B. reporting that her neighbor’s car is under a tree. Fun, fun.

Quote that made me giggle of the day: @jimreams (the entity formerly known as the Nashville Knucklehead): I’m glad I live in South Nashville. Tornadoes don’t speak Spanish.

Found

In my back bedroom: a very scared and (was anyway) still shaking black & white cat, who presumably thought he would never eat again during his 24+ hours away from home, as he has now in the last three hours eaten a can of Fancy Feast, a can of tuna, and a significant amount of dry cat food.

I really thought he was probably gone for good, after having been out looking around for him dozens of times in this unbelievably cold and freezing weather we’re having since last night.

I know I talk about the cats AND the dogs like they’re babies, and talk about them to an eye-rolling, sighing, “she’s talking about the damned cats again” point and often – but this was not quite like when my Mom’s 20 year old cat went on a two-week vacation in her neighborhood.  As worried as we were, that was mainly because she was old and had been sickly – but Snow had lived outdoors many years before I rescued her and sent her home with my Mom.

I’ve long suspected Tojo to be one of those cats who was taken away from his mother too early as a kitten (they tend to exhibit certain signs), and based on what I knew of his past history – other than the night of my car wreck when I found him again and brought him to my house, I don’t really think that cat has ever been outdoors in his life.

AND though I live on a quiet, dead end street, I live just a few steps away from one of the busiest streets in the city.

Anyway, I had pretty much given up and resigned myself to never seeing him again.  He’s never been outdoors, he doesn’t know the neighborhood, it’s freezing, busy street – etc.  Kept telling myself that maybe he had found another place with nice people petting him and feeding him – he may be psycho, but he’s also very, very friendly – etc.

So I went out one last time tonight, shortly after midnight and taking the dogs out for the last round before morning, and walked around a little bit.  Saw nothing, was freezing, turned around to head back in the house.

Then there was this flash of white up the way, zooming across a neighbor’s driveway.  So I went in that direction until I saw what I knew was a cat, but really couldn’t see it in the dark, huddled against the front of their house.  But I was pretty sure it was him, even though I couldn’t really see him.

The first time he came to me and I tried to grab him, I was unsuccessful and off he went again – though not far.

So I just sat down on the ground and talked to him until he came back, and petted him until he was a little bit more calm – and finally grabbed him and took him home.  Thank goodness, because I probably would still be out there sitting in their yard in the dark and turning into an icicle waiting for him to come to me, because there was just no way I was going back to the house without him this time.

He really was scared to death, apparently (a situation probably not helped by the neighbor’s dog wandering around the last two nights).  After giving him some food and some time on his own in his room to chill, two hours later when I let him back out in the house among the rest of us and picked him up and held him for a while, he was very uptight and rigid, and still shaking like a leaf.

Which is just so NOT Tojo.  Tojo is afraid of NOTHING, not even Petey, who is ten times his size.  Before tonight, the thought of him scared and shaking like a leaf would have just been preposterous.

Anyway, he’s a little dirty, but he’s okay and he’s home.  Pretty soon, I’m going to go crawl in the bed like I always do back there, with him under the covers when it’s cold, and hopefully we will BOTH get a good night’s sleep this time.

I couldn’t bring myself to go to sleep back there last night, and slept out here at the desk in the chair instead.  I suspect he either didn’t sleep at all, or didn’t sleep very well last night, either.

Melting

And can I just say this 101 degree weather is totally for the birds*?

My poor window unit acts like it’s going into heart failure every day about 3 or 4 in the afternoon lately.

* (Birds shouldn’t have to deal with it either.)

Go Buy Up All That Milk & Bread, Nashville

I should probably put some gas in my car and drive to Nashville tonight, because it’s been like 90-something degrees here for days (my car’s outside temp gauge on Sunday read 101), and some snow and ice might be nice for a change.

Duh.

(HT: nitweet @ Twitter and Nashvillest)

On another note – does anyone know what’s happened to Short&Fat?  I am still in Rex L. withdrawal and now this disappearance of S&F has me pouting.

Let’s NOT Twist Again Like We Did… Well, Lots in Recent Years

I think once you’ve been smack dab in the middle of a tornado – for instance, separated from one only by the roof, windshield, and rest of the body of your car – you develop sort of a special and strange kind of empathy when people and places you know well (or the place where you got caught in one before) are in danger , or in the middle, of one of those scary mothers coming down from the skies.

Even though the forecasts were trumpeting potential gloom and doom for West Tennessee yesterday and last night, the storms we’ve had the last couple of days in this area were sometimes a little nasty but nothing very out of the ordinary. We had some more early this morning, but other than the fact that my new neighbors’ car alarm goes off EVERY SINGLE TIME it thunders or there’s lightning – and I’m not kidding – most of it’s been, like, meh. And right now in Memphis it’s sunny again and bright (too bright).

Yet at the same time, now, one of my two home counties and a neighboring one just had a tornado warning, though I’ve not heard of anything having happened yet.

And even more to the point, lighthearted and flatly hysterically funny chatter in my Twittersphere this morning has given way to worried and concerned Tweets from my Nashville and Middle Tennessee friends and acquaintances as what looks to be a potentially very dangerous storm system moves into the area. I’m witnessing it all in near-real time, from their points of view, and it’s really as concerning and nearly frightening to me as if I’m right this minute sitting in Ginger’s or Slarti’s or Busy Mom’s laps, or in the newsroom with Christian.

And now, as I write this, it’s a few minutes later and I am breathing a little sigh of relief reading that Rachel and her co-workers have been let back out of the basement, and everyone else sounding a little less cautious too.

With one exception – news via NIT of a confirmed tornado in Lawrence County. I don’t know too much about Lawrence County, and I’m racking my brain to remember whether I know any bloggers or anyone else in Lawrence County, so it’s a little different now… but just a little.

I know what that tornado looks and sounds like, exactly. And I know what it’s like to think okay, am I getting out of this alive? And I know what it feels like, the helpless feeling when you finally realize there’s not a darn thing you can do but wait and see. And I know that even though it’s usually only a matter of minutes, it feels more like hours.

Agonizing, horrifying hours. There is absolutely nothing in the world like it, not that I’ve ever experienced, and hope to never have to again.

Arrival time in Lewisburg 12:45 p.m., they’re saying. One minute from now as I write. I hope everyone in its path stays safe.

Bits & Pieces – The Sequel

(1) Skittles Chocolate Mix – Well, I’m a big fan of Skittles in general (especially the Sour and Tropical), but as many know, I’m not a big fan of chocolate. (It’s “okay”.) So I wasn’t really expecting to like Skittles’ new Chocolate Mix that much, but I sure did expect to like it more than I do. With flavors like S’mores, Vanilla, Chocolate Caramel, Chocolate Pudding, and Brownie Batter, you would just think they’d be better than they are. The Brownie Batter ones make me cough. Real chocolate fans will probably love them though.

(2) Dogs with Little Dreadlocks – Enough said about that, but if it would just (A) stop turning cold or (B) stop raining…

(3) No No No No NO Tornadoes! - Speaking of the above, it’s a gorgeous day out right now and feels REALLY nice outside even though it’s about 100 degrees in my house, and I am so sick of rain. So the news from Channel 2 Weather this morning regarding potential tornado activity here in the west is a bummer, and I don’t deal well with the sirens nowadays. Go away, tornadoes, shoo!

(4) The Beanie Army – Tojo, my cat who terrorizes the rest of the house and lives in the guest bedroom otherwise (but he’s such a sweetie when it’s just me and him), has a new project going too, I noticed. As I’ve mentioned before, since no other animals in the house want to be friends with him, he has made all of my old Beanie Baby and Teenie Beanie cats and dogs that were back in the bedroom his only friends. (As Churlita called him, he’s “resourceful” like that.) Yesterday I noticed he’s got them all lined up, almost in single file, down one entire side of the bed back there. I wonder what this means?

(5) In Hiding – Also, wonder where I put my W-2 and 1099? Hmm.