May Day May Day

There is much to say, but not the time and energy to do it in.  Someday we will post pictures.

Our city has survived a millennial flood.  We feel so fortunate to have been spared, but it hurts to see how badly this has hammered our community and neighborhood.  Sad too to realize a city could drown without much notice from the rest of the nation.

On the other hand, I have never been as proud of my community as I have been in the last two weeks.  I am also proud of the response of our ward.  People helping their neighbor, putting in long hours on dirty, smelly work to help out people who may have been strangers just a few days before.   It brings tears to my eyes thinking of one of the men in our ward late at night mucking out the water soaked insulation from a dear sister in our ward's crawlspace.  That is what it means to bear one another burden and to mourn with those who mourn.  I am thinking of our good bishop who during the three days that their neighborhood was cut off from the rest of the city and from any electronic communication including cell phone, was working night and day to make sure people were safe and to save what could be saved and then took work off for the next week to work the cleanup.  I am thinking of my son and the young men of our ward who had a whole week off from school and spend most of it cleaning homes.  I am thinking of a isolated part of our city that literally had ten or twelve person per house for blocks and blocks helping with the stripping and clean-up of each home.  Church groups, community groups, all coming together to help.  Not just on one day, but day after day.  After a response like this, I think I understand why Tennessee is called the volunteer state.

Sadly, many did not have flood insurance, often because they were told that either that it wasn't offered for their area or because it seemed improbable that they could ever be flooded.  Ironically, we live in the FEMA flood plain and are required to have flood insurance, but our house (and new home) was spared despite having water running on all four sides of the home at one point.

It is also surreal to me because I wasn't here during the actual days of flooding, but had to watch the response of our ward begin to unfold from a far thanks to a google document that was set up by a member of the EQ presidency out of the flood zone that quickly evolved into a command center for the response to a building crisis.  What was scary was when people who have been updating the google document became radio silent and could no longer be reached even by cell phone.  Especially when my home became one of these.  In time, it became apparent that most of our area had lost power and phone and internet, as individual portions of the neighborhood became trapped in their little islands as the flood waters covered the roads.  Fortunately, no member of our ward died or was injured, although sadly a number of older couples from our area were swept away or drowned in their cars.  A good many of our friends and neighbors homes are devasted.  Our prayers are for them and for all our city.

 Several of our friends live down this street and we had looked at buying several homes here.

 Semi-trucks parks in our little town for a few days because the freeway is under water.

 The day after the flood, the soccer field (which is in the background and about 20 feet below the level of the road and normally about 30 feet above the river) is completely under water, trapping many of our friends who live in the subdivision down this road   Rescue crews used their boats to evacuate  houses that were underwater. 

The creek behind our house  overflowed into the easement between our house and the neighbor's house.

Our street beginning to flood on May 2 (It got knee deep on the other end)...

and the next day, flood water gone.

  The creek behind our house is now calm 3 days later.

New Home

After a year and a half of searching, lots of compromises on what we wanted versus what we could afford, we have entered into a binding contract for home not far so very far from where we live now, but about twice the size.  Although the outside architecture layout is not what I wanted (its "snout front"), the front walk, inside layout and back gardens are very beautiful and congenial to our lifestyle.  The sellers are an older couple who are obviously devoutly Catholic (I believe Italian, but maybe French) and have kept it meticulously, and with great style although theirs is the style of an older generation.  They are now downsizing.

We didn't end up with  4 bedroom home we set out for.  However, the size of the girls room and the presence of a large storage room as part of it provided a satisfactory answer to the central problem that really has been the driving need for change.  The storage room will likely becomes JA's private artist nook where she can also go to be alone when her foul moods strike. With the large bonus room there is plenty of place space and opportunity for AM to set up a corner as a sewing nook and also for me in a corner as an office, etc...  The master room is spacious as well.

The yard is the big question in terms of how we will adjust.  The actual yard is rather small, but there is no fence between it and the large continuous common area of the HOA that runs behind all the homes.  So we won't be limited in terms of play area really, just in terms of area that we can directly own and that doesn't have restriction on its use.  So not sure what we will be able to do in terms of a garden.  Being part of a home owner's association can definitely have its downsides, although there is a tiny pool and tennis court that come with being members.

Overall, this seems like the right move for us at this time.  We have loved our present home so much, but we look forward to the increased space and we hope the new neighborhood will also bring the opportunity for new friends for the girls,

Front walk

 Dining nook

Kitchen

Open kitchen/study/living room architecture

 Living room

 Back Porch

 Extension of porch into back yard.

(Our realtor calls the statue the Greek Goddess, I think its just a standard Italian maiden)

Master Bedroom

Master bathroom

(Don't think the statues are staying.)

Standard looking Bonus Room

Making our own traditions

Growing up, Easter Sunday was often marked apart from other Sundays by a large multi-generational feast.

Living in Tennessee, we don't often have the opportunity for this sort of Easter tradition. 
However, living in the South one feels much more like Easter is a holiday because many of the local churches celebrate Ash Wednesday, Good Friday.  The children get out of school on Friday (officially for teacher training but in reality for Good Friday.) 

At the same time, of course, Jewish family are celebrating Passover.

Since the LDS tradition does not have any activities that specially mark Easter week, this year, we decided to create one, modeled loosely on the Jewish passover seder, but tying in the three events that are central to the LDS tradition: passover and the exodus; the last supper/crucifixion/resurrection; and the return of Elijah/restoration of temple keys.
So Friday night, we turned off all our electric light, lit candles and had a meal of lamb, flatbread, grape juice and semi-bitter herbs.

I asked the kids what they knew about these events.  Not the four questions, but maybe forty questions.  Turns out they know their New Testament better than the Old Testament or Doctrine and Covenants.

I don't know if this will become a tradition or not, but it was a nice change of pace.

Still would be nice to have the big multigenerational family dinner.

Radio Silent

We have not gone radio silent, we have just been very busy house hunting and getting our home ready for sale.

Some thoughts from house hunting:

I have a strong dislike for the look of homes where the garage door is the most prominent feature of the front.  This signals that the home is built to shelter automobiles and not humans..  Nevertheless, everything in our price range that we are ending up looking at seems to have the garage door in front.  So I am resigned to having to give in to this sad trend in automobile worship.  Just a plea to anyone who is a developer.  It cost slightly more to give a home a decent front, why not built a few decent looking homes to go along with all your ugly ones? 

Two things have kept us from buying a lot of homes that would otherwise be great buys for us:
Lack of good schools and lack of walking/biking/short trip access to work, mass transit, parks, school, and shopping.But we live in a city that thinks its too expensive too fund these things consistently so huge tracts of homes we won't even consider.Talk about pennywise and pound foolish.  The nearby county that funds most of these things grows and attracts the best and brightest, while our area struggles.  There is irony in this, because they are primarily tax-haters, but have been willing to fund these things because they get that quality of life is worth paying for.  I wish our city council got this or that I worked somewhere that did.

Realtors speak in terms of dollar per square foot and comps, but mostly these are pretty useless measures of a home's value to a family and therefore cost willing to pay.  Whether a home supports a families lifestyle well is the key measure, and two homes with the same square footage can differ markedly.  I wish there was a better metric for this.


In the old days, there were salesmen for everything even in clothing stores and hardware stores.  With each passing year, a salesperson seems more and more a superfluous cost of most transactions.  Instead  you pay principally to have a few staff persons who mostly stock shelves but occasionally assist customers to find what they are looking for.  With the rise of the internet,  people pretty much go find what they want and buy it and advertising alerts a general audience to a products presence, cutting out the salesman per se entirely. So when do you think the housing market will follow suit?  I'm guessing ten years from now, it will be most common for people to pay a small fee to a person who helps them prepare their house for sale and then the house will primarily be sold by homeowners directly online with showing scheduled on-line as well.

Its kind of fun to go to different homes and think about what it would be like to live there.  It also feels somewhat voyeuristic because you feel like you learn an awful lot about strangers when you walk thru there home and poke into all the crannies.
 

Green Eggs and Ham

They look weird but they are YUMMMY!!!

HAPPY ST.PATRICK'S DAY

Random Snippets of Life

Swimming:

(From SD)After the bad news about my hip, I have been swimming to try to stop the steady weight gain.  The good thing about admitting that I am so badly out of condition that I need to start from the very beginning is that it doesn't feel quite so embarassed that it just about killed me to swim a mile last week, so I can take pleasure in the fact that this week, while not fast, I could complete the mile without going into lactic shock.  The other is that I remember how much I love swimming.  Its been a long time since I actually tried to do swim training, and despite how slow I am, it just feels fun.  I have a hard time running on a treadmill or to riding a stationary bike without getting bored, but swimming lap after lap doesn't get boring to me for some reason.  Its exhilarating.  Thinking back, I can't remember why I gave up swimming as a workout.


Band


JP gave a great performance at the mid-state.  I was hoping that someone else would blog about this.  But I guess not.  If we ever get our Vegas movie studio going, maybe we can post some video footage.   The initial performance had to be rescheduled because we were hit with a snow storm that closed down the region. So instead of being at Middle Tennessee State University as usual, it had to be moved to a nearby high school. The advantage of this was since the auditorium wasn't big enough to hold as many people, they actually gave out tickets for each of the different band performances. This really helped because normally its kind of hard to get a good seat for the gold band performance, but with the tickets we had a good spot. The performance really impressive. They played about four pieces which were modern arrangements of songs including
"All Creatures of Our God and King" and four traditional railroad songs. Its amazing the quality of music
that these kids can produce.


Snow


As noted above, we have been blitzed with snow this month. More than we have ever seen while living in Tennessee.  We even called off church because of the snow and the kids are going to have to make up a snow day now because they have had 6 snow days so far this year.  The sad thing is that we discovered that there was a not so slow leak in one of our sledding tubes, so we were unprepared to take as full advantage of the sledding possibilities as we would have liked.  (It turns out that skim boards make great sleds except you can't steer them at all and they catch edges too easily otherwise.)  It would be cool to post some of the pictures  (what do you think AM?)

Reunion

Today in church there was a family sitting at the back of the chapel.  I thought that they were the parents of one of the families in our ward.  After sacrament meeting, the woman came up to me and said, "Hi, I'm (her name) but my married name is (name). Aren't you ..."  When she said her maiden name, I immediately recognized it as one of my classmate from AF High School, but I admit it took several mental adjustments to match her current face with how I remembered her from 20 years ago.  Not that the years had been unkind, but she just looked like a middle aged women which is not how she looked when last I saw her. Anyway, we got to talk briefly.  She has four kids, one graduating from high school this year, and they live in Memphis.  They just were passing through and by random chance happened to pick our ward to come to sacrament meeting to. 

The Blindside

Speaking of Memphis.  AM and I went to see the movie the Blindside based (more or less) on the true story of Michael Ohr, a kid who was befriended by a wealthy Memphis family and was drafted as a left outside lineman by the Baltimore Ravens last year.  I found it really quite moving as it touched close to home.  (Perhaps you have to live here to connect to having all the SEC coaches at the high school practice buttering up the high school coach or to know why someone living in Memphis would have such strong loyalty to Ole Miss and absolutely hate Tennessee.)  After talking with our friends in Memphis, it turns out their kids go to the actual private Christian school that the family attended, although the movie changed the name.

Book and movie reviews

The Help-This book tells the fictional story of a small circle of white women living in Jackson, Mississippi and their African-American domestic servants ("the help" of the title) during the late 60s.  The story is told alternatively from three point of views: Skeeter, one of the white ladies, a would be writer and the least socially successful of three friends that make up the central character in the white circle; Abileen, also a would be writer, who is the domestic help for Elisabeth, (one of Skeeter's friends,) and best friend to Minny; and finally Minny, the most outspoken of domestic help, who works originally for Hilly, Skeeter's other friend, and then after being fired in an incident that is central to the book, works for Celia Foote, an outcast in Jackson because of her white trash roots and because she marries the man Hilly loved.  As Skeeter sympathy for the lives of the domestic help brings her more and more in conflict with the views of her best friend Hilly, she decides to write a book telling the stories of these women.    Of course, as Jackson is the city that murdered Medgar Evers, such an book could lead to brutal reprisal.  So Skeeter must first win the trust of the women whose stories she wants to tell.
This is a superb book, not only for capturing both the brutal and sympathetic race relations of the civil rights era South, but perhaps even more universally the story of women and their friendships and cat fights. Highly recommended.

Three Cups of Tea-This is the real life story of Greg Mortensen, a mountain climber whose failed attempt to summit K2 led to a lifetime of trying to build schools in the high passes of Pakistan.  This is compelling reading and one begins to grasp the difficulties that make our foreign relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan so complex.  More than anything one comes out of this feeling that one person can make a difference, and that when that person can garner the trust of key tribal leaders, miracles can happen.  One also is reminded that our best defense against terrorism is not the force of our arms, but to provide education and meaningful alternatives to the madrassas and jihad.  Although the book is written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, it is told in third person, which I first found a bit off-putting.  Still, since I'm guessing that
Relin did all of the actual writing, with Greg providing most of the story supplemented by numerous interviews,  this does come out alright in the end.

Avatar-I am not generally a fan of James Cameron, I enjoyed this film because of the way that the spectacular special effects film makes the fantasy world of Pandora come breathtakingly to life. By moving elements of the battle of little big horn into a fictional and futuristic setting and then keeping the references to its modern day parallels in Iraq fairly oblique, James Cameron can do a tiny bit of social commentary without raising the ire of his main constituency.  While the story is necessarily predictable (at least if the younger generation has seen Dances with Wolves), the artwork enhances the story telling in a way that keeps us interested and connected. Unlike the dreadful films G.I. Joe and Transformers with their endless eye-candy battle scenes that become boring after 20 seconds, the battle scenes never really seem like the climax in this film.  Rather, it is the smaller moments with discovery of the hidden potentials of the new world and its danger and beauty.   It also occurs to me that the big studios may have identified one answer to the dwindling interest of moviegoers to actually see films at outrageous prices in the theater.  Afterall, this is one movie that is far more satisfying to see  in 3D on the big screen than at home.
Julie and Julia-Meryl Streep as Julia Childs is a hoot. And any food lover will salivate in this small film about a rather self-absorbed New York woman trying to come to grips with her depressing job and lack of success compared with her also self-absorbed but financially successful friends.  Thankfully her far more grounded husband helps keep her in reality and Julie takes to blogging about her attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Childs The Art of French Cookiing in a single year.  The more interesting part of the film is really the back story about Julia Childs and her husband, an American diplomat stationed in Paris.  Julia Childs is played by Meryl Streep and her performance is wonderful to watch.  For my generation that is used to seeing Julia Childs done a parody on SNL, taking on the real Julia Childs is an eye-opener.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox-Cross Ocean's 11 with stop action claymation and you get this very quirky adaptation of the Roald Dahl book. While the sort of winkishly amateur titles and interjection seem a bit odd in a film that used the painfully expensive stop-animation technique and top name actors, this film is nevertheless quite a quirky gem. In particular, evolution of the relationship between the Mr. Fox, a "former" thief and his wife, and then their son and his athletic cousin through the inevitable show-down between the fur-bearing mammals and the farmers.

  Angels and Demons-Unlike the DaVinci code, this movie adaptation of the Dan Brown book is at least interesting as its plot involves a ticking time bomb, a mildly useful and slightly accurate philosophical consideration of history of the Roman Catholic church and science, and the opportunity to see some of the lovely architecture of Rome and the Vatican. I'm curious why the producers made some of the revision that they did, because they made the plot twist at the end feel a bit more contrived, but they did lower the body count a bit which I suppose it makes more palatable to the audience.

G-Force-The Chipmunks turned secret agents, this easily forgettable kids movie still entertained our youngest kids because of the cuteness of the CGI secret agent rodents. The plot rather predictably unfolds with the project to train guinea pigs and other animals as FBI secret agents being shut down by a overeager new FBI manager after an apparently botched raid. The rodents end up in the pet shop, make a few new friends, escape, and stop a plot to destroy the world which turns out to be run by one of their own. While a few jokes are original and funny, mostly this is derivative stuff.   But still better than an hour and a half at the dentist office.