we are nashville

i love nashville!! i'm amazed at how this city has joined together to help each other. we are now getting some national news coverage, but it took quite a while for the media to realize what a disaster we have over here. a blogger (who usually writes about hockey, i think) wrote an amazing article that was kind of a rally cry for nashvillians. it's become our slogan as we're getting through the tough clean up. check it out.

justin and i went out and helped on saturday. it was unreal. we completely gutted a family's home. we either packed up or laid out all their belongings depending on whether they were still wet or not. a couple guys were crawling around in the very small still soaked crawl space, pulling out insulation. nasty, nasty job. when we had to leave they were starting to rip up the floors and the drywall. the homeowners were overwhelmed with the amount of help they had. the man said, "i've never had this many people in my home for a party, let alone to help me clean up after something like this!"

we're still conserving water and hoping the other water treatment plant will be up and running soon. the river finally fell below flood stage a few days ago. (flood stage is at 40 feet and the river crested at 52 feet.) today the tide "loads of hope" trucks arrived and they'll be washing, drying and folding flood victims clothing using their own trucked in water.

if any of you want to help, you can donate $10 to the nashville red cross by texting "redcross" to 90999.

major damage

Well, things are pretty bleak here in Nashville. You may not have heard about this, because the national news thinks there are other things more important. Nashville got over 15 inches of rain in about 48 hours. The Cumberland River, which twists throughout Nashville has overrun it's banks. It crested last night at 51 feet. It has flooded downtown, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Grand Ol Opry, the Titans stadium and many other places. The Opryland Hotel has 10 feet of water in it and all the guests had to be evacuated. The death toll in metro Nashville alone is over 10, I think. Our house is fine, but the street behind us is still flooded. There are two water treatment plants in Nashville. One has been compromised due to flood waters and has been shut down. They are sandbagging the other in hopes to save it from being flooded as well. We are all being asked to conserve water.

Ariel view of downtown:

Wide view shot of Broadway, downtown:

The Grand Ol Opry:

One of the areas hit the hardest, Bellevue:

I-24:

i need a boat

As I'm typing this, my house is shaking from thunder and I can barely hear myself think due to the sound of INCREDIBLY hard rain on my roof. Most of our landscaping in ruined. I'm so worried my garden is ruined!!

Yesterday my friend Rana and I were on our way home from a baby shower in Spring Hill (45 minutes away) and everyone suddenly came to a stop on the highway. We figured it was a wreck due to the rain. Well, it wasn't. There was water covering the highway across the barrier in the middle so high, it would have been over your head if you tried to walk through. We ended up turning around and going the wrong way on the highway after sitting in the parking lot that was I65 for an hour and a half. It took us over 4 hours to finally get home. It was a nightmare. At least we weren't on the other side of town. Look up "Nasvhille I24 flood" on Youtube and you'll see a video of a mobile home floating down the highway. Eight people are dead so far. I guess it makes my worry about our yard seem a little less important.

i need your help!

Ok, all you creative types out there. Now that I've finally finished my CD shelf, I need some tips on how to decorate. What should I put on top? What should go on the wall above? Should I put anything in the really skinny shelves? We can move things around on the shelves themselves some too, if we need to. Here are some pictures of the rest of the room, so you can get an idea of the style.

This is looking into the den from the living room.

This is standing on the fireplace looking back into the room.

And again, the shelf and wall above. The door to the right is the storage/laundry room.

do it yourself project

i bought this shelf at the flea market a while ago and just got around to finishing the project. when i bought it, it was 8 feet long!! I thought it would fit on this wall, but as you can see, it overlaps the storage room door. when the fam was here, helping build the studio, i had dad cut it in half for me. we shaved off about a foot, and now it fits perfectly! i drybrushed it with some golden yellow paint and viola! i still need to finish loading it up with all our CDs, but here's the finished project!

Justin's weekend

This weekend Justin is going to

and staying at

and playing with

at the

grandma, maggie and wynonna

I love them! Aren't they the cutest??

Totally met her last night.

i don't know the difference between lizards and frogs

we have a pond next to our deck in the back that we've been cleaning out. it's really really gross and it's covered in inches of poopy sludge at the bottom. (yummy mental picture, huh?) i bought a pond pump to get all the water out and we'll be using it to make a little waterfall when it's all nice and clean. anyway....in the process of cleaning it all out, we've discovered that we have one ginormous frog. it's at least as big as my fist. really grosses me out. so, when i saw a bunch of little guys swimming at the bottom of the pond, i assumed they were tadpoles and we would have little frogs jumping around every where soon. they were still in the long tail, little back legs stage. well, i'm dumb. they're actually newts! so we're saving them in a bucket and are going to dump most of them in the creek down the street. there are just too many for our little pond. so i feel really smart now!

newt on the left, tadpole on the right













here's our pond, mostly drained and still full of yucky sludge.

hard work

these pics aren't taken from the exact same angles, but I think you get the idea. Justin has helped some, mainly with the things I think are too gross, like fishing dead frogs out of the pond. But most of this clearing has been my blood, sweat and tears. Ok, maybe just sweat, but still. Eventually this will be a beautiful perennial flower bed. We are keeping the pond, but cleaning it out and eventually running a pump to a little waterfall feature that I found when I cleared out a bunch of the decorative grass (which I HATE!)

BEFORE




AFTER

i'm addicted

i told justin it was because i didn't have video games growing up, but I LOVE THIS GAME!! it's really fun because justin and i can play at the same time instead of going one at a time. it took us a while to figure out how to work together without accidentally killing each other. good marriage teamwork? i think so. i should video us while we're playing sometime. we go from yelling at each other to laughing our heads off. pretty comical i think.