So Much Weather, All at Once

Amazing storm blew in out of Texas Monday. (Damn you Texas!) The forecast had called for rain, but when I stepped outside at around 10 a.m. it was so dark I had to turn on the porch light. Across the river, Tori was in her classroom and saw the sky turn green. The school told them there were tornado warnings, so keep the kids away from the windows. The kids, of course, immediately freaked out, and every time there was a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder they all screamed.

There was a LOT of lightning and thunder, and the wind swept in with a fury. This is how strong it was – the wind blew a train off a trestle! I'm not kidding, check out the video here. I would have bet that wasn't possible, but looking at the video, I get it. All those box cars made a big sail for the wind barreling down the river, and as they went over, they took the locomotive with them.

That's the train trestle that's part of the Huey P. Long Bridge over the Mississippi, the same bridge Tori crosses twice a day to and from work. When she headed home, the four-lane roadway was reduced to one lane because of all the emergency vehicles.

In our neighborhood, we got a lot of wind and rain, but the power stayed on, at least here. But it wasn't all sweetness and light. Right around the corner a power pole blew completely over. A swath of houses and stores a couple of blocks wide and almost a mile long were blacked out south of the downed line. This is why I'm glad I'm a northerner. We were fine. When I drove by the morning to take the kids to school, the pole was still lying across the road.

See, this is what happens when you build a housing development on what used to be a swamp. Sure, you can put in a bunch of fill, and you can put in a drainage system, but when you get that much rain that fast, some of the stuff you stuck in the ground doesn't stay.

We've been waiting for more today, but apparently it's mostly move on east. (Sorry Florida.)

But boy, it can change fast, can't it? It's not that we have different weather than we had back in Oregon. It's just that we've got so much weather. Often all at once.

Turning the Table, Part 2

So, as I said, one day about a month ago Tori took a close look at our ugly but very solid coffee table, and decided to do something about it. What she did was kind of amazing.

This is the table 'before.'

Whenever we go to Home Depot, she makes a point of checking out the orphan paint. These are gallons or quarts (or whatever size paint cans) of paint that got mixed and for some reason never bought. At Home Depot they're usually kept right under the paint desk, they're always cheap and often interesting. That's where she picked up the deep blue that now adorns our front door.

Sometimes she buys the paint without having a specific use for it. Just because it interested her. And about a month ago, when she was looking for something to use in our bathroom, she found something pretty cool.

Two quarts of "chalkboard paint." It's that deep green color you remember from your school days, and when you've put down three or four coats, it actually makes the surface a chalkboard. She did it on half this odd wall we have in our bathroom, and now leaves messages on it. The four of us in the house keep very different schedules, but the bathroom is almost always the first place any of us head when we start our day,

And there was plenty left over. So to the table. It has a roughly two-inch moulding around the edge, then a narrow crevice, and the central flat surface.

First she painted the whole thing white. She then applied four coats of chalkboard paint to the central surface. That was very cool. But that wasn't the genius part. In white, the two-inch moulding was kind of boring. So we went to the local comic book shop and bought some cheap comics. Those she cut up and glued them down all around the surface, covering them with a decoupage coating.

I think you'll agree the result is amazing.

The only downside is the chalk dust. It's probably a good thing that I can't just pile books and papers on the thing, but the chalk dust is kind of annoying. After folding laundry and stacking it on the table, as per usual, I found I had to rewash the items at the bottom of each stack. 

But it's a small price to pay for one of the coolest coffee tables I've ever seen.

Turning the Table

It started with the paint.

No, it started with the table, but it was just a table for more than a year. A beat up, chunky, water-stained, worn coffee table. I big, hefty chunk of wood, still a perfectly serviceable coffee table, solid. Heavy. Makes vacuuming the living room a chore. But was it ugly? Oh yes.

I had a picture of it, but managed to delete it recently, so you'll have to use your imagination.

Tori and Millie brought it home one night from a Craig's List curb call. You know, where someone posts on Craig's List "I've got some furniture," or bag of books, or a lava lamp or – seriously, this one was in Sunday morning – a bag of assorted animal bones. They give their address, say they're putting it on the curb, first come, first served. And you're off to the races!

Sounds tacky, I suppose, but it's fun. A come-as-you-are scavenger hunt. A couple of times I was just getting ready for bed around midnight and Tori would say, "We've gotta go! There's a something or other on the curb at ..." and we'd be off. Or the afternoon or morning, whenever. Sometimes you get there just as another person is driving away with it. Sometimes you get there and think, "This is crap. I'm not putting this in my hand, let alone in my car."

But sometimes it's just what you need, whether you knew it or not. And it's an adventure.

One evening Tori and Millie dashed out – so it had to be between August and October 2012, between when we moved into this house and when Millie left for school. When they came back they had, among other things, a coffee table.

Big, heavy, ugly coffee table. Still sturdy, but ugly. For a year it was good enough. It got the job done. In our house, the job for almost any flat horizontal surface is to let me pile paper and books and whatnot on it. And it did that well. There was usually so much stuff on it you couldn't really see how ugly it was.

Then one night not too long ago, Tori gave the table a good look. She started thinking.

This is where the paint comes in. And the comic books.

And since this is long enough, the rest of the story – which is pretty amazing – will be told tomorrow.

Spending an Evening with Ben

Great day Thursday, driving up to Jackson, Mississippi, to see son Ben, who was in town to do an acting gig for the ABC news show, "What Would You Do?"

I hadn't seen him in seven years – since 2008 when I was in L.A. for Jeopardy and 2007 for the Talk Like a Pirate Day hoopla at friend Talderoy's Ye Olde Tattoo Shop, when I drank a lot of rum and got ye old tattoos on my arm. Tori saw him last summer. For Max is had been even longer than it was for me.

So Tori, Max and I drove up. Jackson is about a two and a half hour drive, a straight shot north from NOLA. It was an easy drive and well worth it. And Linda (our car, pronounce the name with the Latin "leen-dah) was a champ. Got better than 30 miles per gallon, which ain't bad for a car older than both Max and Millie. It's a '92 Tercel, and on the way up it rolled over 100,000 miles.

Ben, dear OLD dad and Max. Don't
you LOVE my shirt? Neither do my kids.

I was dressed specially for the occasion. Tori suggested I wear my dashiki, a shirt I'd bought on the island for a couple of bucks. You have to understand that years ago I started basing my wardrobe choices solely on comfort and shock value. Anything that will startle the children is good enough for my closet. I don't care about fashion. I also brought my maroon polo shirt, what I call my, "don't embarrass the kids" shirt that I wear for parent-teacher conferences, and planned to change into it once the dashiki had had the desired effect. But once Ben finished laughing at me, he was comfortable enough to say I didn't need to change.

I should have worn one of my Hawaiians, I guess.

Ben and Max in Ben's room.

It was great to see Ben, of course, and catch up on his life and steady climb up the entertainment ladder. And Ben was a little shocked when he saw Max – hadn't seen him since Max was about 8. He's grown a bit, to say the least. Max has shown people Ben's picture and they say, "No way that's your brother, he's too hot." (Seriously, they say that.) So we made sure to get a picture of them together.

But one thing we all agreed on, Jackson is a hole. The worst city I think I've ever been in, drab and ugly and falling down at the seams. Definitely the worst state capital I've ever seen. The only part that looked OK was the downtown area, which was heavily torn up by urban renewal construction and you could see it would look kind of nice if/when they finish. But it was all the more telling that, as rundown as the city is, the only place them seem to be putting any effort it the downtown

Driving up we'd passed by or through a series of comically named towns on the edges of swamps and wondered, "Why does anyone live here? What made them decide, 'This is the place?'" Once we saw Mississippi’s capital we decided the residents of those other places had said, "Well, at least it's not Jackson."

It led to one of my best lines in a while. As we passed through one town, Tori read the name and asked, "What's a Tickfaw?" I replied, "Fer suckin' blood!" (It works if you read both lines aloud in a southern accent.)

Saucy ribs mean sticky fingers! Great
food from E&L Barbecue.

But they did have fantastic ribs! Ben had "yelped" (oh these kids today) for a good place to eat and found E&L Barbecue. The woman at his hotel front desk told him it was good, so we headed off and found it. A hole in the wall. There's a security guard at the door and a sign that says "No firearms permitted inside." So that had us on edge. Lots of tables inside but no one sitting at them. It seems to be takeout only, and there was a line, about 18 or 20 ahead of us, and as we moved up more people filling in behind. The air was sharp with the tangy smell of wood smoke and barbecue sauce. We got our order and went back to Ben's hotel to eat.

Wow! It was great. I had the pulled pork sandwich and it was delicious. Then started looking over the plates of the others, all of whom had way more than they could eat. Three ribs later I could hold no more.

Anyway, Ben's doing well, and we hope to see him on TV soon. We'll update on that when the day nears. We drove up, saw Ben for about three hours and had a good visit, then drove home another two and half or so hours. A day well spent.