Shantytown

We needed shade and this is what we had to work with. I explain all this in the video. I also repeat myself several times. I say the same thing a lot too. Also, my wife!


I'll get better at this eventually.

War-zone

(Photo Courtesy of Birmingham News, Mark Almond)

                                       
I just passed through one of the harder hit areas this morning. I had heard how bad that it was, even seen a few pictures. I thought that I was prepared and yet my jaw was in my lap the entire time as I drove. Traffic is still restricted to one lane, so I had plenty of time to go slow and just take it in.

Destroyed cars, homes in pieces, I even saw a brick house with the top half (not just the roof) ripped clean off. The civic center where many local schools had basketball tournaments and graduations was severely damaged, with daylight clearly visible all the way through the middle of it.

The Huddle House, which I would have thought to be a sturdy building, barely even qualified as a pile of rubble. Trees down by the dozens, power lines, and folks scurrying all over trying to put things to some semblance of right again. That was just the main street in Rainsville. I dared not venture down the side roads in the affected area.

Good on the people working hard to clean up and fix things, but it's gonna be a long time coming before anything is ever "normal" again. For some people, it never will be again.

Roughing it

Tornadoes ripped the hell out of the South East last Wednesday. We got off extremely easy. Our place was basically untouched by any of it. Many, many folks were not nearly so lucky. Some people lost their homes, or even worse, their families. For us,it was simply a matter of surviving a few days sans electricity.

The whole situation really wasn't so bad. I dug a small fire pit outside and ringed it with cinder blocks, scrounged up an old grill rack, gathered up a lot of fallen branches from around the property (that I should have cleaned up a long time ago), and just kept it burning for most of the time. We cooked as much as we could of the things we had in our fridge and freezer, plus some stuff my mom-in-law brought us from their damaged home as they headed for the safety of a hotel room in a nearby town. My wife even figured out how to make coffee for us! (Among other things.)

I never thought I could be sick of grilled meat, but there it is.

We even managed to cobble together a little canopy for shade out of stuff we had lying around. We took a little video of that which I hope to get edited and posted very shortly.

I kinda feel bad saying that we had a good time "camping" while so many other people were suffering but I can't help it. It felt good to test ourselves in that sort of situation and learn to make the best of things. We learned much about what we could live without, which was surprisingly a lot, also what we could and couldn't do with stuff we have lying around the place. It was a good trial run for becoming the self-sufficient people that we dream of becoming. The situation also gave birth to some intriguing ideas regarding sustainable green energy that I plan to explore in earnest very soon.

Even in the hardest of times, one can learn to make the best of what is at hand. If only free pallets and mimosa poles could bring back lost lives...