Month: May 2011

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Don’t expect to get much spare change there for a while.

Yesterday, I drove up to the north part of Minneapolis to visit some friends whose house got hit by the tornado over the weekend. You could tell they’d already done a lot of cleaning up because there was a huge pile of branches and random pieces of trash at the edge of the road where the city will eventually pick it up.

I’ve had very limited experience when it comes to natural disasters, so what I saw was… wow. I can only imagine what it was like for people who’d been living there for years. I was driving down the street toward their house and about a block north, everything looked fine. I mean fine. There were a couple pieces of junk that had been scattered around—probably blown there from someplace else—but the trees still had leaves on them. Hell, they still had branches on them. Not so much when I got to the Porter house. Continue reading “Don’t expect to get much spare change there for a while.”

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Time to unplug (again)

I thought of trying to write something more substantial in this blog entry, but I have things to do before 8:30am tomorrow, which is when I’ll be leaving for the cabin with some family members, which will hopefully include my grandma. (If she’s not feeling well, she’d rather stay closer to a hospital—can’t blame a 93-year-old for wanting to be cautious.)

I have work that I probably should be doing which would require my laptop, but I’ll be leaving it at home this time. At this point, I’m thinking I’ll leave everything home but my phone, which I don’t use that often anyway (one of the benefits of having an old-school flip phone as opposed to something that can access the Internet). There’s a TV and a radio at the cabin, but there’s also space to read lots of books and take lots of naps. I’ll probably be doing both.

I may do a little journal-writing and post it on here after I get home, but the important part is just getting away. The sun will wake me up instead of my alarm (whether I want it to or not), my email account will get stuffed with crap I may or may not read… all sorts of things that will be waiting for me back here, so there’s no point in worrying about it there.

So no computer, no mp3 player, won’t watch the TV… nada. I’m pretty sure I’ll feel at ease rather than anxious, but I probably won’t know for sure until after the second or third nap. Have a good Memorial Day weekend, everyone.