Friday Favorites

I am going to try to list some of my favorite things each Friday. They may not always be my favorite things, but on the particular Friday that I am writing maybe they are...

Favorite thing happening to me: We got very lucky, again. The news keeps reporting that it could be up to three months before all of the tornado debris is taken away. Well, they started working on it yesterday...on our street. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks we will no longer be looking at 7 foot tall piles of cut up trees and trash. I'm super happy about this because the view out of my front windows has been less than inspiring.

Favorite Project: The table that my hubby is building is getting there. He is about half way done with it. I can't tell you how impressed I have been with his "handyman" skills since we bought a house. While I sometimes get very annoyed that he won't just sit down, I'm grateful to him for all of the work that he does around here.

Favorite Song Right Now: Jolene by Dolly Parton.

Favorite Surprise/People: In my last post I wrote about my dreams filled with old friends. That's funny because I keep hearing from people I haven't spoken to in years and years. In fact, on facebook, I was contacted by a girl I haven't seen or heard from since the summer before 6th grade. Seriously. Out of nowhere (and we have no "friends in common"), I get a friend request from someone I haven't seen in (I will not say how many, but I'm sure you can guess) years. That's cool. Then, last night, I talked to an old church camp friend. She is truly one of the best friends I have ever had. She was inspiring, courageous, lovely, and supportive in a very important time in my life. Somewhere around me moving to New York around the turn of the century and her leaving the town she had grown up in, we completely lost touch. We had no idea how to get in touch with each other until the internet caught up with us both. It turns out that we lived about one hour away from each other during the time that I was in Georgia. How upsetting. I could have been spending time with one of my favorite people. I really could have used her support during that year. It sounds like she could have used mine, as well.

Did I dream about old friends because my subconscious was telling me to get in touch with them? Did I somehow expect to hear from someone out of the blue? Life is so full of surprises, and that is one of my favorite things.

A whole bunch of random nothingness

I've been having strange dreams filled with people that I haven't been in touch with for years. In these dreams, even though we've lost touch, conversations continue as if we've been together every day in the past decade. I imagine that real life conversations with these folks would be filled more with uncomfortable silences than casual conversation.

My ten year high school reunion is happening this October. I won't be there. My husband and I will be celebrating our anniversary. Honestly, I wouldn't go if I could. My class had 650 students. I didn't know half of them. The few people I would want to see probably wouldn't show...I was much closer to people from other high schools anyway.

A couple old friends came to visit this past weekend. It was great to have a relaxing couple of days with them. Of course, after they left, I was hit with the reality of living in this city where I don't know anyone. That is a depressing fact. I hate that it becomes so much harder to meet people when you get older. (I also hate to admit that being married makes a big difference in how easy it is to meet others.) Plus we live in a place where most of the people have had the same group of friends since childhood. It's not exactly easy to break in on that.

We are working on building a desk/craft table for me. This is something I am very excited about. Hopefully it will help to push me to do more creating.

Excitement or Horror

A huge storm hit the Jackson area on Friday afternoon. High, straight winds, hail, and an F2 tornado whipped right through my neighborhood. My next door neighbors on one side lost both of their cars and a detached building that he works out of (along with all of his business supplies). Down the street, multiple homes have trees that are sticking out of them, or have split them in two. The damage seems never-ending. Our electricity has been out since Friday. It was a very frightening storm. I was stuck in the van with my sister’s family and our two dogs while the heavy hail bombarded us. We were luckily a few miles away from the worst of it (my neighborhood) at the time. While I was very afraid, I had to show nothing but calm, for my nephew was sitting in the back seat reciting, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

I am so thankful that we were all okay. This is the second bad tornado that I have been extremely lucky through. In September, 2005, while living in northeast GA, my husband and I were woken by a tornado in the middle of the night. It was caused by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (that night). We pushed ourselves into the two-foot space in the bathroom closet of our second floor apartment, next to the hot water heater. When the tornado ended, we went back to bed. The next morning we were woken by police, because Tony’s uncle had panicked when he couldn’t reach us over the phone. Half of the small town we were living in was blown away. We lived directly across the street from a shopping center which was demolished. There was a wedding chapel two doors down that was completely blown away, pieces of it sticking out of our own building. Our roof was lifted three inches off of the building. There was an Econo lodge down the road that lost it’s second floor.

After being so lucky in two tornadoes, and having moved away from NYC 4 days before 9/11…I am afraid that my luck might one day just run out.

Surprise Visit!

When I rolled out of bed this morning around 10:20, my husband told me that someone had called my phone half an hour before. I checked my voice mail and was surprised with the news that an old friend would be in town for today only. I haven't seen this friend since my wedding two and half years ago, and we have rarely spoken on the phone. The phone thing is completely my fault. I am terrible about calling people, and phone conversations make me very anxious.

When I learned that he would be in town around 12:30, I was super excited. We picked him up at his hotel and went straight to lunch. Then I kidnapped him at gunpoint and forced him to come back to our house with us. Not really, but if it had come down to it...I just might have done that. I have seriously been in need of some time with my true friends. In the past six years, that time has become much more precious to me because it has become so much more scarce.

He stayed and played with me until 8 tonight. He had to get back to his hotel for a crack of dawn flight in the morning, and I miss him already. I am thinking that I really need to get some close friends together for a good, long road trip at some point in the next six months. I don't know how easy that will be to do, but I feel like it would make a huge impact on my life in a very good way.

A sign?

I've been cleaning house today, looking forward to a visit from my sister and her family.  While trying to organize some papers, I came across stories I wrote for a creative writing class back in 2003.  I decided to sit down and read them again, and as I did I was surprised that it was my own writing.  The subject matter was almost all dark and a little disturbing.  The notes that my teacher left on these stories were so nice, I was shocked.  With all of these final drafts, I found a paper he had included for a contest for student writers, noting that I should send some of my work in.  Now I wish I had taken him up on that advice.  I don't know why I didn't.  I guess I've never really liked my own work.  Artwork.  Writing.  Knitting.  Photos.  It doesn't matter what it is.  I can never impress myself.

Anyway, it felt a little like a sign finding those today after starting this blog yesterday.  Maybe I will write some new stories and poems and post them.  I think that I've decided I am definitely going to go back to school.  I'm not completely psyched about the schools in this area (at least not the ones that I can afford).  I'm going to start looking, though.  Maybe it will help me to get excited about some things again.  Hopefully it will help me to meet some people in this city.  I've lived here for 9 months, and I haven't really met anyone.  That has to change.

Speaking of change, I should change the name of my blog.  I think it's going to be more about writing than knitting.  

This New Blog of Mine

Writing used to be my passion.  Somewhere in between finding myself in a happy relationship, moving 6 times in the past 7 years, and becoming an adult I seem to have lost the drive.  I have journals filled with my words, yet I can't honestly remember the last time I sat down to just write.  I'm out of practice.

Now I find myself in a city where I don't know anyone.  I find myself in a new job where I "write" for a living (albeit not the kind of writing I'd prefer).  I find myself unsure of who I am and what my true passions are.  There was a line in a movie this morning that shook me.  "It's never too late to become what you might have been."  It was in the film Away From Her.  I immediately started thinking about these words, and what they mean to me.  I'm not sure, but I know that they are the main reason I decided to come over here and start blogging.

The funny thing is that it's not the first time a movie quote has really taken over in my life.  For years, when i was a bit younger, I followed the advice of a quote from the movie Legend. Embarrassing, I know.  It was, "The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity."  Go ahead.  Read that again.  I am struck with how similar the quotes are, and by the fact that they are saying the exact opposite of each other.  Maybe that's the difference in youth and maturity.

I won't always write about writing.  I'm not planning on blogging about movie quotes, either.  If this will help me to actually write, I just plan on actually writing.