Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Ultimate Southern Experience

I have out of town guests visiting. So they planned to spend the day in Memphis...oh yea...I got a call around 7 that they were under Tornado watch and the sirens were going off. They were at Applebee's and were getting cozy since the tornado watch was in effect for about an hour. Not only did they get to hear the sirens, but they got to see an amazing lightening storm and hear the massive thunder claps that we get. Add that to the 13 year cicada infestation that we are having and all I can say is, Welcome to Tennessee. :)

I have to say, the bad luck that seems to be targeting my friends better stay away from me. My friend got married over the weekend and on Monday left to go on her honeymoon...in Jamaica. Now you may have heard that the air traffic controllers in Jamaica are on strike, so my friend and probably hundreds of other people did not get to enjoy their planned honeymoon in Jamaica.

Now I'm not trying to head to Jamaica for a honeymoon, but I do have a bunch of out of town guests coming to visit. We are having a graduation celebration for my daughter and it's going to be outside amongst the cicadas. I want smooth sailing although its the twists and bumps that keep life interesting. I'm just so super excited that everyone is coming to visit. Will be great and I should have some fun stories to blog about when its all over.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

I'm a big kid now

Mommy, do it it for me. Pwease???????

I love May 1st. It makes me think of tulips and iris's and daffodils in Oregon. It also makes me smile and think of the sweet (according to me) old lady who lived across the street. I'm not sure that everyone else would call her sweet, as a matter of fact, I know they wouldn't. She was sweet to me and I could do no wrong. :) Everybody needs someone like that in their life; someone who thinks that you hung the moon. Someone to always take your side and spoil you rotten. She was that for me and in return, on May Day (May 1st), I learned in school that you are supposed to give flowers to someone. My first grade brain interpreted this as an anonymous flower giving occasion to cheer up an old person. I don't know why or maybe it was just a project we did in school, but it stuck with me. So every year, on May Day, I would go across the street, pick all the pretty flowers that were blooming (yes, from the garden in front of her house) and put them on her doorstep and then ding dong ditch. When I was big enough to ring the doorbell that is. When I was still too small to reach the doorbell, I would just kick the corner of her screen door, then run and hide around the corner of her house. Which, now that I think of it, the corner of the screen door curled ever so slightly outward from me kicking it so often throughout the years. And of course I was the only one who ever did that, so she most certainly knew it was me, not to mention that she probably watched me pick all of her flowers first, they were after all, just underneath her living room window. But in my kid mind, I was doing something nice to brighten her day.

Nashville has fared well through the storms and only a few times have we had to go to our safe place. Two of those times I was at work, so we went into the stairwell, the other time was about 5 minutes after I left work and I was in my car, so I couldn't do anything. It was rather freaky but it passed by really quickly. We have had so many tornado watches that it seems almost like the boy who cried wolf...the weatherman who cried tornado, but in this case, I'm still going to take them seriously because with my luck, the one time I didn't believe them, the storms would produce a tornado and I'd be caught unprepared. And hey, I get paid for the time we have to sit in the stairwell, so I'm not complaining. :)