That Hobbit Lady

Having a lazy day around the house.  We went out this morning for a quick walk around the neighborhood, because the weather has been more…shall we say…”temperate” than it’s been lately, but after that, spending the rest of the day indoors.

But “lazy…”  Well, not exactly sure on that.  Doing laundry, gathering stuff for a trip to Goodwill, going through paperwork, and we just spent a half hour cleaning the office (and it looks much better now, thank you very much! )  I’ve also been going through some old books and CD’s.  Some are going in that box for Goodwill, and others to be posted on our half.com account for sale.

I liked it last week when we had Monday off for Labor Day.  There’s something really special about a Sunday, when you don’t have to go into work the next day.  But for tonight, it should probably be early to bed for me.

C.S. Lewis said:

You don’t HAVE a soul.  You ARE a Soul.  You have a body.

Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted here.  Life just seems to be so busy all the time.  Now, of course, lately, life really HAS been quite busy!  I wrote last time about the podcast that Russ and I are doing.  It was only about a month ago, and so far we’ve posted five podcasts!  It’s time-consuming, but fun.  The more we do it, the better we’re getting at it, I think, and we are both coming up with systems and routines on how to do it in the best and most efficient manner.   We may take a night or two off, but soon we’ll be back at it again, planning, recording, editing, posting.  Five is in the can, and six and seven are in the works!

Other than that, I’m hoping to get back to the gym this coming week.

Don’t you just love it when you think something terrible has happened, and then you find out that you are completely wrong?

This afternoon, we suddenly lost half our water pressure at the kitchen sink.  All the other faucets were working fine, so we had to conclude it was an internal plumbing problem.  Internal plumbing problem means hiring a plumber…not something we want to do, financially, at this point (or at any other point, for that matter!)

We tried a couple of things, checked valves, and ran through the recent history of when the faucet was last working well—only a couple of hours before.  Well, it suddenly occurred to me that while cleaning out the hummingbird feeder, I had switched the faucet head from “stream” to “spray,” and then back again.  So I did it again, and discovered that when switching back to “stream,” somehow I had only opened the flow about halfway.  When I pulled it open all the way…ouila~!  Water pressure!  Just fine.

Now, this is only a small example, but things like this are always happening to me, and sometimes I forget to count my blessings.  So I thought I’d mention this little incident now, and say how gratifying it is when the mountain turns out to be a moehill after all!

We are nearly three months out from the tornado.  I say “The Tornado” because in the collective memory of the people of this town,  no other tornado could possibly have earned the title of THE Tornado.  This was The BIG One, and it did a lot of damage, from which we are now slowly beginning to recover.  But it occurred to me the other day, that as
many areas that were hit by The Tornado, there were many, many important structures that did not suffer direct impact. And that is a very good thing.

So I’m  “counting my blessings.”   Here’s the silver lining:

There are two hospitals in town, and one was on the very fringe of the tornado’s path, almost hit, but not quite.  It remained up and running and available to receive people who were injured in the storm (unlike in the tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri, where the hospital was one of the major areas hit.)

Likewise, a police station, just missed.  Water towers: all okay.  And City Hall, not even close.

The tornado came very near, but did not touch any of the buildings on the University of Alabama campus—the single largest employer in the city.  Classes were cancelled for two
days, and there may have been some tree limbs down, maybe a few broken windows, but no structural damage.

One elementary school was destroyed, but to the best of my knowledge, all the other public schools survived.

A shopping center at one of the busiest intersections in town was completely obliterated, but the Mall across the street from it suffered only superficial damage.  Across from the Mall is a new shopping area, Midtown, that did not even exist when I moved here four and half years ago. Relatively new, it also was not touched.

Down 15^th Street, a Wendy’s restaurant was recently knocked down and completely rebuilt.
That new Wendy’s, less than a year old, suffered minor damage but was quickly open again. And a good thing too, because we lost a number of nearby fast-food joints:  McDonald’s, Hardees, Taco Casa, Milo’s, Guthrie’s Chicken.  (Not to mention the devastating loss of Full Moon BBQ, and the Hokkaido Japanese Grill.)  Two Arby’s in town were extremely close to the path of destruction, but not hit.  The Tornado passed between them, as if they were goal posts for the winning field goal.

Another  great loss
was the absolute demolition of Krispy Kreme Donuts.  We had only one Krispy Kreme, and now it’s gone.  And there are no Dunkin Donuts in town!  (A situation, which I feel, needs to be remedied, sooner rather than later!)

But nowadays, when you drive past the place where the Krispy Kreme used to be, fund-raising organizations like kids’ baseball teams are out there selling boxes of donuts brought in from Birmingham.  So everybody wins.

To me, it’s a sign of hope.

Yes, a lot of bad stuff happened on account of The Tornado.  But there was a lot of bad stuff that COULD have happened, and didn’t.

We are the people of Tuscaloosa, bent but not broken, and we WILL have our Krispy Kreme donuts! Everything that was lost will either come back (like Krispy Kreme) or we
will have something BETTER in its place.