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.