Little Things Mean A Lot

Less Debris - The city finally cleaned up some of the fallen trees from the side of my street yesterday. I didn’t have much in front of the house, but both sides of the street beside my house were filled with tree trunks and limbs. They didn’t do the whole street, but did both sides of half the street and a little more than half on the other side. It just looks so great not to see those tall wide piles of dead tree debris! We still have piles of stuff from inside our house out there on the other side of the street, like my living room furniture and my refrigerator, but I know day by day, street by street, pile by pile, things will get better.

Daily News - I got a newspaper yesterday. There was no paper for weeks, and then we started getting a “daily” newspaper twice a week, Wednesday and Sunday. Then yesterday suddenly there was a Friday newspaper. Maybe that means more days? Another step back into normal!

TV News - I have a couple of local channels I can watch on a real TV! (Local for us is New Orleans.) Until now we’ve gotten one channel out of Mississippi on our little snowy black and white portable TV. The cable company hasn’t even sent in workers here yet because there is so much damage. The word is that it will be six months to a year before we have cable TV again, and maybe even much longer. But now my husband has put an outdoor antenna up for us--the things we went through to get that darn antenna. The channels we get are out local ones, so we know what’s going on in Louisiana, like the weather, what’s being opened where and what’s still closed. We get one channel in clear, another a little snowy, and then five more that we mostly can’t get in good enough to watch, though a couple come in better at night, but it’s all local stuff! (Smile)

Back to School - Talking about things opening…my daughter’s high school will be opening up for classes Monday. The schools here still have damage and need a lot more work done, but the kids have already missed over a month of school, so it’s time they get back. As it is the school board will be taking away holidays, adding nearly an extra hour a day to classes, and extending the school year by at least a couple of weeks. Duke Power that has been down here helping had been sleeping at the high school, since they were there, they did a lot of work that they weren’t even asked to do. They also gave the school a check for five thousand dollars to help replace some of what was lost. The Pennsylvania National Guard that has been here helping out so much put in time working on things at the school too.

Help From Others - If any of you know someone in the Pennsylvania National Guard or someone from NC that works for Duke Power, or those who give or help with the Southern Baptist Convention Disaster Relief from Illinois, tell them how much their help meant to us down here. I don’t know what we would have done with them, and the help of so many others who came down here in these awful conditions and terrible heat and gave their time to smaller areas like ours that didn’t have the same press value as places like New Orleans. Just saying thanks seems like nothing at all compared to the help they gave us.