She brings you good news. Or haven't you heard? When she fell out of Kansas, a miracle occurred.
DOROTHY It really was no miracle. What happened was
just this: The wind began to switch -- the house to pitch
And suddenly the hinges started to unhitch.
Just then, the witch -- to satisfy an itch --
Went flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch.
When Dorothy and Toto landed in Munchkinland squarely on top of the Wicked Witch of the East, the Munchkins naturally were curious as to how she happened to navigate her house to make such a strategic landing. Good Witch Glinda calls it a miracle but Dorothy explains that it was just happenstance due to a switching wind and the Wicked Witch's unfortunate decision to take her broomstick out for a spin at that precise moment. Last Saturday, the wind in Raleigh definitely switched but I was lucky and my house didn't pitch and no witches were harmed.
Location, location, location, and this little building in the middle of a big cement island at a busy intersection makes me smile whenever I see it.
YASS! This is, indeed, a strange spot and it sends the imagination into overdrive. I can't help but think of advertising slogans which may apply here.
"Does she or doesn't she? " Maybe it isn't only her hairdresser who knows for sure. That's a pretty darned big window.
Brylcream says "a little dab'll do you" and that good, because there's no room for big dabs.
When women entreat Calgon to "take me away," is this be the location they have in mind?
Suppose making one feel special inside that small building takes some time... is there an inside facility for... um... squeezing the Charmin, should the need arise?
Our ever-sassy hen, Ima June Pullet, wants to know if they have a drive-thru window.
Artists have always enjoyed traveling the world to find new places for inspiration. I'm not one of them, unfortunately.
I'm a white-knuckle flyer and I love my own bed (and bathroom) too much. Our six cats and one decrepit Toy Fox Terrier need me.
And did I mention the 60 hummingbirds who come to our feeders every day?
So it was a real joy to discover the website Virtual Paintout, created by artist Bill Guffey. Each month he chooses some spot in the world where artists can meet and paint or draw and then submit their artwork to the site.
But it's all done virtually by way of Google's "Streetview"---which enables you to virtually drive or walk around cities almost anywhere in the world.
Here are a few of my past entries. These are all scenes and people as they appeared on Streetview.
Click on images for enlarged view.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go let my little dog out.
[More on the topic of: Location, Location, Location]
When I go back to my hometown of York, PA, I can literally take a trip down Memory Lane. But the street seems horribly misnamed today, because hardly a thing along said street is the same as it was when I lived in that town.
There really is no place like home, since "home" doesn't seem to exist for me anymore. The notion of going "home" for the holidays leaves me feeling off-kilter, since my father allowed my childhood home to literally fall down around him. There are new owners now who've reportedly built something from the ruins, but other than peeking from the safe distance of Google Street View, I really can't bring myself to go by the old place.
For a number of years my own efforts to put down roots were tentative at best -- during one five year time period I moved a total of seven times! My mother and step-father, meanwhile, retired to Florida and occupied a series of homes in the 20 years they spent there. None of those places were "home" to me.
Now my mother, widowed, is living in my "new" hometown, and we have shared a house for almost 7 years. Most of the time it feels like I'm living in her home, but I'm slowly beginning to accept that I'm growing new roots here, rather than looking for the first opportunity to move somewhere more cosmopolitan. And I am feeling less of an obligation and more of a desire to stay put and make this place truly my home. There's no denying that I also want my daughter to never feel as I so often did: that there was no "home" to go home to.
Nevertheless, I've adopted the turtle - or maybe tortoise - as my personal totem. I like that turtles are "at home" wherever they go. The unhurried pace at which they travel through life suits me just fine. And a tough outer shell is a quality I'd like to cultivate for myself, too -- along with the willingness to stick my neck out more often.
I can't stand to wear turtleneck sweaters, though. Do you think that will pose a problem?
[The topic for this cycle: Location, Location, Location. No irony intended]
(The Weather Channel, April 16, 2011, North Carolina map)
A helluva storm blew through the South on April 15th and 16th, stomping my old stomping grounds--and Ms. Henny Red's hometown--on the 16th with three tornadoes at once in one locale. Henny's internet and land line phone are still down, but her cell phone is working. She asked me to tell you all that she and her loved ones are safe and unscathed. She's learned how lucky they were. Prediction: some severe weather stories coming up right here from our Henny.
(AP Photo/The Fayetteville Observer, James Robinson)
Raleigh wasn't alone. This storm stalked across the South from Tulsa to Gloucester Court House. Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia all saw devastation, with as many as 44 dead at this early count, with 80 wounded. Arkansas reported hail measured at four inches in diameter on April 15th.
Convection profile over Raleigh (The Weather Channel, April 16th, 2011)
Henny went to her sister's house, where they hunkered down in a hallway. And, yes, she says the report that a tornado sounds like a freight train is true. And the hop-scotching destruction, true. Her sister's house had some relatively minor roof damage, but a block or so away, houses were crushed whole. She says that all her personal experience with tornado warnings over the years had led her to expect the usual: a sighting somewhere reported in the news, some pictures in the newspaper, maybe a power outage. Not whole houses disappearing. Not colleges closing for the semester. Not lives permanently re-directed in a single, random moment. She'd heard of such things, but she wasn't prepared for it.
According to KTLA in Arkansas,in a two day period, there were 241 tornadoes reported, with 50 confirmed.
I had a heads up on this storm. My son phoned Friday from Nashville to say a neighbor's giant trampoline had been blown into the side of his house--seemed major at the time and possibly avoidable. I made a bee-line to my next door neighbor's to beg him to turn his kids' trampoline sail-side down.
By Saturday noon, the Weather Service was startling us silly with loud alarms and warnings to take shelter under a table, in the lowest, centermost area of our house.
Here's irony. The For Sale sign that lives eternally in my front yard has a flyer box with a brochure touting the openness of my house, the light, the windows, windows, windows. Turns out, the safest place in my house is a tiny bathroom that barely provides sitting room for one person. No tables. If you push in a few big cushions from the screened porch for padding, it's standing room only.
While growing up in Greensboro, NC, and attending colleges in the Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), I suffered a recurrent nightmare: tornadoes ringed the horizon and my job was to protect the women, shoo them to prepared shelter, save them from the storms. Not a man in sight to help out. The primary emotional component was helplessness. That dream began with puberty and stalked my nights right into my thirties. Which might explain why I chose a women's college after high school. In graduate school, my shrink-in-training friends had a Freudian field day with my head, and ya'll can testify that I'm still not quite right to this day.
So there I was squashed in the teensy bathroom on Saturday afternoon. New batteries in the flashlight, check. Candles and lighter, check. Cell phone all charged up, check. Weather radio blaring ear-splitting alarms in a space the size of a utility closet, check. Incipient panic attack, check. Tornadoes spotted mere miles away. No other women around for me to save, but I was on the job. I'd done everything the early warning system and my own worst nightmares had prepared me to do.
Dearest Husband--the retired fighter pilot whose adrenalin glands were marshaled into submission forty-five years ago --he, on the other hand, was tired from moving all the hanging baskets and bird feeders onto the screened porch. He was grumpy from the rapidly dropping barometric pressure. He wanted me to turn the damned radio off so he could take a nap.
All we wound up with at our house was strong gusts of wind. It all shot through at high speed and was gone. The weather today is so beautiful, so sparkling, so sweetly perfect, it'll take your breath.
