wren08 | Entries tagged with tornado

This is the tornado that came so close to us as it was going through Ringgold.

In better news, I found the Chaucer I have been wanting. It's bound in leatherette instead of leather but considering that it's still a fascimile edition and at a price I can actually afford, I'm happy. I'll be even happier when it gets here!

The phone and internet got turned back on this afternoon and boy do I have a lot of catching up to do! I'll be posting what I've already written (I couldn't not journal) as well as a long list of photos but I will put the photos under a cut and put the dates where they should be in my journal. Most of your friend pages will not even show them, I think.

Sooo good to be back on line!

Current Mood: cheerful

I have to work today. I hate having to work on Saturday- partly because I have to take Emily to Mom's and partly because it just seems all kinds of wrong but mostly because when I only have one day off, I don't get rested. I get everything done that needs to be done but I don't get in much play time.

This is day 9 without internet and I am beginning to feel like I am stranded on a desert island with no encyclopedia. We didn't have internet when I was growing up, of course, though we did have a phone but when I wanted information, there were four encyclopedias in the house... and I could always bike to the library on the weekends. So I'm really hating the information blackout.

On the up side, I'm working on Mother's Day in floral which is usually a very very fast day. When I go in, I'm building a display for roses and then the rest of the day, I'm making cut arrangements. Personally, I don't like the way the arrangements are made where I work. They're stuffed full and then some and I'm more for fewer flowers, elegantly arranged. I think there's some oriental influence at work there.

Blerg- time to get back to it.

Still without internet. I keep telling myself any day now, any day... but not yet today. Arrgh!

I'm going to have a lot of catching up to do when I do get reconnected- I've got one book to post- by then it might be two, some charms stuff, entries, pictures and a recipe for buttermilk biscuits. Also a short one for a different kind of baked chicken which is so simple I'm not sure it even qualifies as a recipe. And I have Emily's new school picture to share- I got that this morning as we were walking out the door.

Yesterday I had the day off from my job (not off from work- that's a whole different thing) and when I dropped Emily off at school, I borrowed their internet long enough to finish my book order, post some feedback and clean out my email. I couldn't get on facebook- even though I used the kid's trick- but I confess I did not try very hard. I had a lot of things to do and not any too much time to do them in.

I'm not going to detail everything I did yesterday or today- it's been a couple of long days and most of it is boring and I'm quite tired. I woke up in the middle of the night and instead of sensibly going back to bed, I came in and watched two episodes of Firefly with 80s. He's getting nicely addicted :D

Dinnertime- I'm really really hoping that I'll have connectivity when I get back...

Nope. Damn.

I suppose I should be sanguine about it- if the internet was up, I would probably spend too much time on it tonight posting everything that's been building up. And looking for books- for some reason, I'm really keen on building my leather collection right now. I discover that I don't have all the Wodehouse I want- I don't even know if the rest of them are available in the Heron series. Since it's collected works, I'm rather assuming that they are but I can't look it up without the internet- Aarrrgh! And I am missing several Bujolds- don't know if they were ever released in leather- Easton has a bad habit of releasing some books in a series and then never releasing the rest of them.

I just need to learn how to bind books myself... and get the equipment to do it. And possibly become a book doctor- now there's a profession I'd love! I guess there is not much call for it any more, what with Kindle and Nook and so many people who just don't read. For me, reading words on a screen will never have the appeal of sitting down with a good paper book- the nicer the book, the more appeal it has. I don't collect leather bound books for their collectible value, I just like reading them. And, I confess, I like the way they look on the shelf.

I'm not alone in that, either. I have seen decorators use that look in houses where books are never opened. Once I was bidding on a set of books on ebay in swedish and, because they were leather bound, they were being sold as a decorative item instead of for their contents. The titles were not even listed- I had to zoom in to read them on the spines. I lost the bid, of course. People who love actual books are always short of money, it seems. There's a very old quote on one of my bags "When I get a little money, I buy books. If there is any left, I buy food and clothes." I don't remember which of the greek philosophers said that but I understand how he felt!

Once again, I'll post this as soon as it is possible for me to post anything.

I'm dead tired of drunks.

I hate living with them- they don't remember what they've said and you never know when something is going to set them off. It's a lot like living with an overgrown 3 year old.

The wasband taught me that being kind and unjealous in a relationship is an invitation to a man to leave. 80s is teaching me that I do not want to put up with anyone who drinks or does any kind of drug that impairs them. Which is a little hypocritical of me since I smoke and drink coffee. I don't want to give up my coffee but this makes me more determined to get rid of the smoking.

Anyway- I can't get rid of my mom- and I don't see any way of getting her to stop drinking- but I don't have to have anyone else in my life that doesn't stop at a drink or two.

I really don't want to be alone but I'm tired of people who want to dump more stress into a life that I am desperately trying to de-stress. I really intensely dislike conflict and I get more than enough with things like the bus driver I have to deal with this morning and Emily's oppositional problems.

Just as an aside, I really want to order my books! This is possibly a side effect of the aforementioned stress. I was watching a peacock edition of Pride and Prejudice but it will have already sold... plus I'm really thinking I would prefer the leather. I'm also wanting to run down a facsimile edition of the William Morris Chaucer. I've seen some scans of pages and it's absolutely beautiful! I wish I had discovered the Easton reproduction before it was sold out- maybe I can find one on Ebay from someone who doesn't know what they've got and are only trying to get out of it what they paid for it. (Even at that it won't be cheap.)

I also need to talk to my car insurance people about home insurance and find out if Mom has insurance on this house and I need to insure the contents or if I need to insure it all. I've spent quite a lot of time and money getting the house into a fairly good shape and, if we had been in the path of the tornado, I doubt that what is on it now would be enough to rebuild it as it is. Not to mention that if I have to rebuild ever, I want to make some upgrades. A fireplace to start and a utility room that I can walk into without tripping over something that I need to keep.

I notice that, even without internet, I'm still journaling at lot. I'm going to have bunches to post if we ever get it back!

5/2/2011
Dear Diary,

What a day it's been...

No joke, that. It really has been a day.

I asked, when I took Emily to school, if the buses were running. If they weren't, I wanted to make plans for that. But I was assured that, yes, they were running their regular route. Just before I left work today... and I do mean just, I'd already clocked out... I got a phone call from Emily. One of Mom's friends was driving her to my work because the bus had put her out at the elementary school- about 5 miles from my house.

Say what?!? The bus driver just put her out, essentially on the side of the road, far from anywhere she should be. And this on a day when I have no way of calling anyone and, once I get home, no one has any way of calling me. I can see me hunting all over everywhere for my child and not finding her... and that's if she was safe. I don't want to go into the thoughts of her either trying to walk home through the tornado damaged area or, even worse, accepting a ride from a stranger out of pure desperation.

Yeah, I intend to go off on someone in the morning at the school. If I have my way about it, that bus driver will be looking for employment elsewhere and in another field of work entirely.

About work- they have me scheduled for three different departments this week, sometimes at the same time, on six consecutive days for a total of 45 hours. Now I don't mind working that... but I have already approached the store manager about the overtime because I don't want to be the one in trouble for it. I also reminded him that I don't have that cloning thing down yet and he was the one to mediate between departments as to who gets me when. Sometimes I feel like a bone being fought over by a pack of rabid dogs and I can do without the extra stress. I'm perfectly happy to do any of the four jobs they want me for... but I can only do one at any one time and paging me to floral when I'm in fruit or the front when I'm in floral just reduces the actual work I can do. You can tell me to water but you have to give me time to water- if you pull me off that to carry out or clean up a spill, the watering does not get done. If you pull me off cutting fruit to make up bouquets for people, the fruit does not get cut. You'd think they would have figured this out by now.

On the nice side of the day, I got a couple of charms in the mail.

This one is supposed to be a lacemaker but she looks like a quilter working on a lap frame to me. If you need more explanation as to why I would have a quilter charm, you don't know me and what are you reading this for?

This second one is the Hermatige- home of Andrew Jackson just outside of Nashville. I visited it quite often growing up and, while no specific memories of it come to the front, I always thought it was the ideal 'house in the country' that I wanted to have one day. Ok, I was young. As I grew up, the house I wanted shrank simply because I'm not crazy about housework and the bigger the house, the more housework you have.

The other nice thing is that the electric company sent a truck (ok, three trucks) to check and see if our power was back on. Someone had called and reported that our power was out. I don't know if that was Eliz or 80s or someone else- I didn't do it- but they came today to fix it. As it happens, our power outage was already fixed when they fixed the main lines. I did ask about phone and internet and was told that right now they are concentrating on getting everyone's power back on and fiber optics was secondary to that. He did check all the lines here going to the pole and they're all fine- the break is a lot further down. I already knew that but he said since he was already here, he wanted to be sure that when the trunk lines were back up, I'd have no trouble.

I must say, I am impressed with our power company. They're been working like dogs to fix all the storm damage as quickly as possible and they're doing an amazing job. Yes, my internet is still down... but the poles themselves got ripped up and broken never mind what happened to the wires. So not only are they having to resting miles and miles of wire, they're having to set the poles to run it on as well. I found out that my fiber optic comes out via Apison Pike and if you looked at my earlier pictures of Apison Pike you can see why I am in no mood to be critical.

Having said that, I do wish I had my internet and phone back. (Tiny private selfish growl)

Since I don't, I'm going to go indulge in a nice hot shower (at least the phone can't ring while I'm in the shower!) and then spend a little time quilting in some good lighting.

I'm missing the internet quite a lot- I didn't realize just how much I use it for everyday information. I use it to check the weather, to check up with Emily's school, to keep up with friends, to check news and facts and even spelling.

Right now I need to find out if Emily has school this morning, how warm it will be today, the square root of Pi (to settle an argument from several days ago) and let Emily print off desert pictures for her poster project that is due Friday. Oh, and check with the EPB and find out how much longer before my internet is back. Without the internet, I can't do any of those things.

And then there's shopping. Just before we lost power, I had three books in my ABE basket- two leather bound Oz books (Borders Leatherbound classics) and Pride and Prejudice in leather with the Thomson illustrations. I'm seriously hoping that no one bought them out from under me! I was also looking at a House of Seven Gables charm and now I want two tornado charms- one for me and one for Emily. I'm fairly certain I've seen those... but I can't check!

I keep trying to be patient and reminding myself that it's a huge blessing that I have a house and power right now. I am not good at patient.

I fell asleep last night watching the news to try and see if Emily has school this morning. I still don't know but 80s woke me up when he got home from work with the news that Bin Laden had been killed. I can't say that I am happy about that- more along the lines of relieved. I know he was a rabid dog that needed to be put down but I still deplore the necessity of it.

Right now I'm enjoying the fact that it's 70° in here, not 50°, that my coffee is hot and oatmeal was easy and both were ready in under a minute, that I can flip a switch and the whole room is lighted and that when I go take a shower in a minute there will be water and it will be hot.

I read Secretariat last night. It is an intensely boring book- for once the movie is much better. I'm not saying that the story is uninteresting- it's a great story- but the author inserted far too much detail about the horses' pedigrees. Unless you follow racing, most of the names of the horses will be ones you never heard of and the details of horse breeding are not something I was interested in reading up on.

Still no internet- which is not surprising. I'm sure the EPB is concentrating on getting power restored to houses rather than phone or internet. I have to agree, power is much more important.

I don't have as much clean up as some but I'm cleaning up from camping out myself. I've got a cooler that I almost never use and I'm going to pack the camp shower and the tiny battery powered florescent lamp in it along with paper plates and anything else I think of that we don't keep around much but is very useful when we're out of power. I'm considering putting a box of matches or a lighter in as well- and maybe some batteries. The thing about batteries is that I think they loose their charge over time. Lighters may do the same thing... and I am debating the container of clorox wipes. They're mega handy to wipe off hands... but they might dry out before our next power outage. Maybe if I seal the wipes themselves in a ziplock and drop it back in the container they would hold- not sure about that.

The upside to being without internet (or anything else) is that I have gotten a good bit of quilting done and I'm planning to do more today. The mini florescent lamp was awesome for that after dark.

I also caught up on my sleep. When you can't clean, you can't watch TV, you can't play on the internet and there's nothing to do but quilt or read, you tend to go to bed when you're tired. Or at least I do- Emily was another matter- she was afraid of nightmares.

It looks like it might rain at any minute- I hope just rain!

I feel like I should be going over to the school and volunteering to help somebody with something- I don't know how useful I could be but surely I could do something. The only problem I have with that is I would have to take Emily and I would spend most of my time keeping up with her- even on her meds she'd be pretty hyper in a situation like that. Plus I'd have to argue with Mom and her isolationist tendencies.

By now I'm sure you have all heard that an F-4 tornado went through my neighbourhood. We were so very lucky- we were inconvenienced but were far enough away that we don't even have tree limbs down.

I'm going to put the pictures in a separate entry because 80s took quite a few on his first jaunt out- I didn't know to take the camera when I first went out and it was even worse. We were without power but that's not uncommon here for a little while after a big storm so I didn't think anything of it. And then we were driving through trees and over powerlines and through the remains of houses- it was awful. These people are my friends, my neighbours and my customers and I was horrified to see what had happened to homes and yards. I hadn't been able to hear any news reports so I had no idea that we had been so badly hit so close to home.

All the people I know are ok, as best as I can find out but several people have unlivable houses and one friend of my Mom has no home at all- he escaped with only a cut on the head, thank all the powers that be.

Our worst problem was water. Since we have a well, no power means no water and no water is hard. One doesn't think too much about water- until there isn't any. Water for drinking is not so bad- they sell cases of water for drinking at every store. Water for washing- hands, bodies, dishes, clothes- that's where it gets hard. I finally went to the army-navy store today and invested in a camping shower and a camping percolator (we melted the lid of my stovetop percolator- go figure). When we got home, we had power in less than an hour but I will have it for next time so I don't feel like it was a waste. I also went to the laundromat and washed clothes- Mom reamed me for that after the power came back on but I didn't know we were so close to getting it back- they were saying 3 weeks so I was setting up to manage for three weeks.

As a matter of fact, I had come up with a clever plan of filling my 5 gallon shower unit at work every day and then we would have had enough water for everyone to have a shower every evening. If we showered into a mop bucket, that would also give us enough water to flush the toilet- something else that takes a good bit of water that no one ever thinks of.

While we were at the laundromat, a fellow quilter told me that SewBeeIt- the best quilt shop in the south-east- had been destroyed. I knew Ringgold had been hit pretty hard but that was very sad news. I hope they rebuild- they had just expanded. This comes right on the heels of our other local quilt shop closing so it's doubly bad just now.

All the cooking we were doing on the grill- including coffee which was annoying. I'm practically useless without my coffee so trying to light a fire and set it up to brew first thing in the morning was interesting at best. If I was trying to do it before dawn, that was even worse. We didn't have a problem with too little food but rather too much since the freezers were defrosting and we were trying to cook and eat things before they went bad. I'm not much of a griller so 80s was doing most of the cooking- he's very good at it which was fortunate.

With all the damage, we've had a problem with looters and gawkers out here- so the police shut the roads down. That wouldn't have been so bad but it was Saturday before they managed to find a way to tell who to let in and who to turn away. At different time I have had to detour 30 miles out of my way and/or show my driver's license to be allowed through. At other times they were not letting anyone through because the roads were blocked my work crews or by downed and live power lines.

Strangely enough, Eliz didn't seem to have any problem getting through to see me and make sure we were all ok. I think she was most concerned about Mom- which is as it should be. She's the one who would have the most difficult time. They had lost power twice for a short time but were otherwise ok and power had already been restored at their house. She and Ross took video on the way over and she promised to email it to me- I'll post a link if I can but it's pretty horrible too.

On Friday, they had the whole neighbourhood locked down- no one in or out- to the point that the policeman in front of my house would not let me out to go to work.. although another one did later when I told him that I had to go pick up medicine for Emily. Which I did, I was not fibbing... and 80s need medicine as well. Fortunately Mom did not- I had just brought home her medicines a few days previously and there is nothing that I must take every day.

Right now (Saturday night) we still don't have phone and internet so I will have to save this and post it later but given a choice between no phone and internet and no power and water, I'm happy enough. The previous entry was made possible by a station at the elementary school. They were giving away food and water and helping people with injuries- and also giving out cards to residents to get through check points without trouble. At the back of the school they had a tent set up with charging stations for all kinds of cell phones and other electronic devices (Emily got to charge up her PSP there which made her very happy) and courtesy internet connection. It was through the school's wifi which meant that both LJ and Facebook are blocked sites but one of the kids told me how to get around that. (It figures that the kids would know how)

Amusingly, the mail has still been being delivered- they're letting Rita through- but we can't get the paper. ???

Just before this happened, my living room light fixture (that I just had fixed) started flickering and popping again so while the power was out, 80s and I replaced the fixture (it looks just the same) and now that we have power again, it works well. We were joking, while we had bare wires hanging down, that it would be just about right for the power to come back on while we were doing that but we were either lucky or not so lucky, depending on how you view it.

I planned for this to be an unplugged weekend- I just didn't plan for it to be quite like this!