Your E-mail Message – Your Reputation

There are a lot of writer’s groups out there today, and many writers turn to them daily for support and encouragement from others who have walked the fire with them. Writing is often a lonely and trying profession, probably one of the few where you have to open yourself up to rejection over and over, often for years before you make that first real sale. After that first book is published, you open yourself up in a brand new way to even more people. Surrounding yourself with other writers, even on list, is like stepping into a warm embrace.

At least it should be.

But there are group members out there on any group who seem to take joy from stirring up trouble. If you say something is red, they say blue. Some like to feel superior, so no matter what you say, they know more than you do and no one’s answer but their own can be right. Others seem to thrive on negative energy. They will gladly point out your weaknesses and then take full advantage of them. Others will take insult to anything you say and send an attack missile in.

Ah, I see you are nodding your head. So, you’ve met Ms. ArgueWithAnyone, Ms. SmarterThanYou, and Ms. GiveUpWritingYouAreNotGoodEnough….as well as a few of their little friends.

Wait, before you nod too hard, are you ever guilty of the same things? Maybe without even meaning to or noticing that you are doing it. If ever in doubt, don’t take a chance, file that message away and read it over later before you hit send, or maybe just hit delete.

Why does it matter?

Because group members notice those troublemakers, even those who might do so often but blindly. Every time you send a message you are putting your reputation on the line. If you are a published author, or want to be one, when you send a message to a group you are speaking to your public. Writers are huge readers. I can’t name the number of times I’ve been contacted off list--I’m a group moderator--by members who are fed up with some certain other member’s posts. I get comments like, “I wouldn’t buy a book with her name on the cover if it was the last book in the store and I didn’t own a television or a radio!” I’m not overstating their feelings either. I’ve even heard worse with words I’m not going to add.

So before you forget that people can’t see a teasing smile in an e-mail message, or before you answer in haste or anger or even hurt…think it through. Think of how many people will see that message in that group. Think of how easy it is to forward that black and white print to others, privately, another group, a blog, or a website. Or even the fact that the group’s home page will save it for years for others to look at maybe at a much later date. Once you hurt someone or make them angry, they have a habit of remembering your name and what you said forever, and sharing their opinions of you.

It’s your call. You can send the kind of messages that will have people speaking well of you or you can show people a side of yourself that they might find really ugly.

What a Difference a Week Can Make

My husband Glen had a week’s vacation last week. For seven days we let the fur fly around here. (He’s much better at fur flying than I am, but don’t tell him I admitted that. Smile)

You wouldn’t think one week could make such a difference, but boy did it. The big oak tree that crushed our shed and just about every plant in our back yard, is all gone now. Well, there’s some huge hunks of it left back there, but it’s in hunks now….instead of one big tree. The crushed shed is gone, the limbs are gone, things are raked up and although a lot of the plants look worse for the wear, I know most of them will look better next year.

Inside, we finished moving things around and got a lot of the sheetrock tore out. We also got our new hot water heater in and it works great. We even have DirectTV now. We ordered it but they never showed up to install it. Fussing did nothing, so finally my husband, handsome jack-of-all-trades that he is, decided to give it a go and install it himself. He did it! So now we have channels again, lots of them. I can watch all kinds of things. (Smile) Our cable company says it is going to fix things here and come back, but I’m not so sure. I haven’t seen one of their trucks out fixing anything, and their office here is still shut down and boarded up.

We lost a number of businesses thanks to Katrina. Some were looted, some just threw in the towel, and some had already been on the edge, and such a long time of being shut down just gave them a final push. We lost a neat little corner Mexican place where we liked to grab a quick bite, our ACE Hardware, a gas station, and other places, including our theater, which was the only show we had here….it was also the only place for teens to even go out together at. It seems our local newspaper is hanging on, and is now delivering three times a week.

Sadly we have lost another person in town too. A man who worked with my husband died last week….doing the same thing my husband had to do….cleaning up a damaged tree from his yard. We have one huge oak left to saw up, but thankfully this one is flat on the ground instead of leaning against anything.

Hopefully the newest storm, Wilma, won’t have anything to help her get stronger and maybe she’ll fade away and then there won’t be any more to worry about this year.

Pictures of Bogalusa after Katrina

I put up a second picture page. The first page was filled with pictures of my home, yard and street after hurricane Katrina. The pictures on the second page are more after pictures, but these are from all over Bogalusa, Louisiana, the town I live in.

http://www.charlottedillon.com/Hurricane2.html

Things Could Always Be Worse

I’m a big believer in never saying that things can’t get worse, because they always can. I also have a habit of pulling myself out of feeling bad for myself about anything by simply taking a look around. Katrina was awful. The twelve hours or more than she pounded us was terrifying, the days afterwards, with the heat and the bugs and the worry over how long our food and water and meds would last was something I don’t want to ever go through again, but…

There’s always a but isn’t there. (Smile)

I still have only a few local channels, but I’ve caught some news and I have the MSN homepage. The two headlines there that caught my eye today were Thousands killed in Asia quake & Hundreds killed in Guatemala mudslide.

Like I said, Katrina was awful and thousands of people were injured or suffered, and probably by the time they get through with the counts, more than two thousand paid the highest price of all, the price of life. But… when you put two thousand up beside twenty, maybe thirty thousand, it puts things in a better perspective of just how very lucky the states that were hit by Katrina really were.

My city, Bogalusa, has a population of around fifteen thousand. That means everyone here could have died during Katrina and we still wouldn’t have reached the numbers from that earthquake alone. I can’t imagine being in the middle of that kind of death, where whole towns are gone, where maybe one single family member is left to stand alone without even a friend alive to turn to.

We got a really good taste of what it’s like not to have power, phone, running water, stores, police, even a hospital, but when it got too bad and we knew we couldn’t take any more, we were able to load up in my husband’s truck and drive away to help. It might have taken us a couple of days to cut a path to get that truck out, and maybe we had to drive hours away, but family was there waiting and we had the means to get there. Once there and near a phone, my on line sisters and others rushed to my aid. I received calls, cards, letters, even gift cards and money, to help me at least start to start over, to assure me I was cared for and held close with prayers, thoughts and warm light and love.

I had my husband, my children, even my pets, and we weren’t alone, not really, not for one single second. I wish it could be that way for everyone!

The Greatest Losses of All

It’s taken me a little while to write, or even mention very much about the things I lost that hurt the most. At first it was too painful to think about it in detail, and then I pulled something in my neck and back, trying to do too much around here, and have spent a number of days that mostly consisted of me in bed staring at nothing, waiting for the pain to go away, for my neck and back to heal enough for me to get back to work on the thousands of things I need to do.

There was other pain there too though, emotional pain. Too much time to think, to relive, to regret. Most of that pain came from a couple of boxes of belongings that the flood waters of Katrina took away from me. They weren’t things that money could replace, like my furniture, my appliances, my car, my shingles or my walls. Losing those things hurt, but they were things that money and time and work, can and will one day replace.

But there are things that no amount of money or time can replace.

There were two big boxes in my house that got over looked during the flooding. Lots of things did really, since we never expected the water and since it came during the worst fury of Katrina, surviving seemed more important than saving things. These two boxes were in another room, in the back at the bottom of a closet, dusty and forgotten. I had actually looked for some of the things in them for a long time, and couldn’t find them. Couldn’t remember to save the world what I had done with them.

As soon as I began to dig through those boxes, I remembered.

I was putting some new photo albums and scrapbooks together and I had located a lot of family photos and keepsakes that I wanted to include. I just didn’t have the time to do it, so I put them all away in those two boxes for safe keeping, for a later date, for a time when I had more time.

The story of my life.

If I had only known then what I know now. If I had only put them on a top shelf, or in the attic, or found them before when I was searching for those old family photos to go on my family site, if I had thought about them and moved them, or if I had… Well, if only and if had were magic, I guess they would help. But they are only words and what’s done is done.

I didn’t find those boxes until after we came back home, after Katrina was long gone. Nothing I had gone through or lost brought me to my knees, but the things in those boxes, as I looked through them and slowly realized what all was in them, and that nothing was left of it, that did bring me to my knees. I would have traded my whole house and everything else in it for what was in those two boxes, but hurricanes don’t make trades or deals and what is gone is gone.

Even now I can hardly bear to list the items that were in those boxes. I guess I’m doing it as a confession because I feel like somehow I failed the family members who have gone, the family members who are here, and even those who are yet to come.

In those cheap cardboard boxes were a number of years’ worth of pictures of my children and family, as well as other rare and precious, irreplaceable possessions. My kids’ baby books were in there, old black and white photos that no one else had of family members who died years before I was born, there were letters in there that my mother, a child bride, wrote to my father during World War II, letters he wrote back, the wedding vows my husband and I exchanged twenty-two years ago when we were young crazy teens who everyone said would never make it, in those boxes were clippings from my babies’ hair and the little hospital shirts they had on the day I removed them to dress them to come home, the signed guest books from my mother and father’s funerals, school pictures, keepsakes, odds and ends and many other things that make up the collection of a lifetime of special moments.

All of those things were nestled safely together, or so I thought, sitting and simply waiting for me to find the time to scan them into my computer, bind them into a scrap book, stick them into a photo album, or hand them down to my children.

All of those so dear scraps of paper and ink that was so easily destroyed by the rush of flood waters that filled my home on that awful morning, can never be brought back. They were in my safekeeping and I failed. And maybe that’s the hardest pain to take of all.

Some Pictures of Katrina

I took some pictures right after hurricane Katrina of my home and street and yard. I've put some of them up on my website, some of the ones I took with my digital camera.

If you want to have a look at them, you can find them here http://www.charlottedillon.com/hurricane.html

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.

Some Thoughts, Observances, and Opinions

Bogalusa Is Gone – At least lots of companies seem to have us listed that way, as destroyed, as no more. It makes it really hard to get a lot of things trucked or sent in here to us.

We are here. I swear we are here. It was bad enough when it seemed the government or the powers that be forgot about us in the first days, more than a week really, following Katrina, but now I feel like salt is being rubbed in an open wound. The repairman came, and joy oh joy after everything we are going to have to replace, he said that my freezer, which is less than two years old, can actually be repaired, but there’s one little problem. The parts’ company says Bogalusa is gone, so they won’t send in parts. The repairman said the office here is working hard on it and hopes to have things fixed in a couple of weeks so they can get the parts and fix my freezer.

Jellyfish – We have some. Well, we did. I doubt they are still alive. After all, jellyfish need saltwater and that’s not around here. How did we get jellyfish? Katrina brought them. There are a couple of large ponds at the sawmill where my husband works. When they where able to go back to work after Katrina, they found a new addition to the ponds, and it wasn’t more logs or big loud bullfrogs. It was small little bell-shaped jellyfish. Alive and swimming around. They don’t really swim though, do they? Well, they were alive and doing what ever you call what they do to get around. (Smile)

My Car – She’s gone. I know she flooded and has really been gone for four weeks, but the insurance company paid me her (very low) blue book value and then sent a tow truck to haul her away yesterday. I know it’s silly for me to be upset about it. I mean I’ve known for a month that she was dead, but she was my first nearly new car. The best car I ever had, I’ve babied her and cared for her to make her last, I didn’t owe one cent on her, and the insurance company just plops down a little money and hauls her away to some car graveyard without a glance back or a second thought. Like I said, silly of me to be so upset about it. But I guess we feel what and how we feel.

And While I’m on the Subject – I don’t understand insurance companies. Especially those that sell homeowners insurance. I’ve paid mine for over twenty years without one claim. Now I really need it and it’s hardly worth the paper the policy was written on. We made sure we had hurricane coverage, but guess what, that doesn’t cover water damage even when it’s caused by a hurricane. Go figure.

Blessings – I know I’m whining and complaining above--that whole weak human thing I’ve mentioned before. (Smile) But I know I’ve been really blessed. Sometimes I think we get so caught up in the bad that happens that we forget about the good, like that old saying about feeling sorry for yourself because you didn’t have shoes until you saw someone who didn’t have feet.

I might only get one station on our little black and white TV, but I’ve seen enough there on news in just the last couple of days to remind me of how blessed my family truly has been and is. After all, we might have lost our shoes, but by darn we still have our feet.

On top of that, I sure have a lot of great friends to dance with, even if we have to do it on line through e-mail and blogs. Thanks to every one of you who has danced the Katrina jig with me. Can’t say it hasn’t been interesting. (Smile) If it’s all the same though, let’s sit the next fast one out.

There’s No Place Like Home!

It’s been four very long weeks today since Katrina turned the world upside down for me. But yesterday, things righted in a huge way. I moved back into my own home! (Smile) I’m writing this on my own computer in my own tiny little office under my own lights using my own DSL. (Smile)

We can’t use the whole house since half of the rooms--the ones we’ve added since we bought the place twenty-two years ago--have to have the sheetrock and insulation ripped out and redone before they will be safe to use. But luckily the older part of the house is brick with interior block walls. We’ll need to repaint them and do some work in the older rooms, but nothing that will keep us from living in them while we work. We lived in this house while we built each new room on, so we can deal with the mess again. At least we’re home!

We had worked hard and planned to move in Saturday, but Rita messed things up for us. We still have two trees on each side of our house. The two biggest ones are next to the two rooms we are going to be sleeping in each night, so we figured it was best to wait until the winds from Rita were over before coming home. (Plus, we mostly stayed under a tornado watch because of Rita from Friday until early Sunday.)

Rita hit the Louisiana/Texas state line, and since we are on the Louisiana/Mississippi state line, I really didn’t believe the weather reports I found on line about the winds and rain we were going to get from her. But we got it.

Friday was a little rainy and windy and cloudy, but not bad. Saturday morning though the wind really picked up. The gusts were pretty strong, probably the highest about forty miles per hour or so. They were the worst about the time Rita was straight across from us. A few small limbs came down that were already weakened probably, some of my plants we had moved outside got knocked over, and a couple of pieces of tin and a lot of the blue tarps and such covering damaged roofs, including our own, got blown off. By late Saturday night I think the worst of the winds were over, and from the weather channel website I knew she was moving up and dying down, but we still got some good gusts all the way through the night, and even had a good wind going Sunday morning sometimes. The spells of rain we got didn’t last too very long though and were far between and then finally none.

Heck, after Katrina, Rita was next to nothing here in Bogalusa.

I will admit she played havoc on already threadbare nerves and ragged emotions. Almost everything in Bogalusa shut down Thursday evening and didn’t reopen until today, even the banks. The mail hasn’t even run since Friday morning. My son’s college is about an hour and a half away, closer toward where Rita hit, so it was closed too and the parish beside us was partly evacuated. (The schools here in Bogalusa haven’t ever reopened, though the hope is for them to be able to next week.)

Each time a heavy band of rain moved through Friday and Saturday I thought it would bring rolling water with it or last until it reflooded my home. It didn’t. I just knew those strong wind gusts were going to bring another tree down on my home, or on my husband’s truck. My son had already replaced his car since he has such a long drive back and forth to school each day and his wife’s car wasn’t in good enough shape to keep making that trip. His new car was parked under the half of his carport that made it through Katrina. Most of the day Saturday the winds we got from the side of Rita were strong enough to keep lifting the end of the carport. He just knew it was coming down on his car, but there was no where safer to move it because of the trees, or parts of trees, that are still standing, as well as the debris that the wind flung around.

I’m more than happy to report that through all of the weekend bad weather our power didn’t go out, though it flicked and blinked a few times and I feared it would go.

By Sunday we were a little worse for the wear, but we packed up our things and brought them home. Things aren’t perfectly clean here, but it’s our mess. (Smile) We spent a few days here after Katrina, what a nightmare that was, then we spent over a week all the way up at the top of Arkansas with my sister. She had one tiny spare bedroom. My husband and I shared the bed in there and my daughter slept on a cot-size mattress on the floor near the foot of our bed. My son and his wife slept on a mattress in the living room.

When we came back to Bogalusa we stayed with our son and his wife for two weeks. They didn’t have an extra room so we slept on a mattress on their living-room floor and my daughter slept on the couch.

I can’t tell you how great it feels to be back in my own home! I’m not back in my bedroom. That was one of the new rooms. But my daughter is back in her room and we are in the bedroom that used to be my son’s. We also have full use of the kitchen, my little office, and the bathroom. Not a bad setup at all! (Smile) We worked our butts off the last two days, and today won’t be much better, but that’s just fine.

We bought a new refrigerator last week. Yesterday we got out and bought milk, eggs, butter, cheese, mayo, lunchmeat, and all that kind of good stuff that you find in your fridge every day. I even have a gallon of sugar-free tea in there. Something I haven’t had any of since the hurricane. I planned to be refilling my freezer too. We plugged it in to check it a couple of weeks ago when we got back to Bogalusa. It ran so we thought it was working. We found out this weekend that we were wrong. I just finished paying for that darn thing a few months ago too. There’s so much we need to replace, repair, or redo, but I guess the only way to do it is just one step at a time. The most important needed things first and then every thing else as we can. I supposed the freezer, hot water heater and my car should be the next three things. We’ll take the others in some kind of order as we get to them.

Cleaning up more is first on the list for the next few days. Since we stayed after Katrina I was able to get all of our wet clothing out of the house and hang it around on lines and the fence to dry. (Got an awful sunburn doing it.) Being dry saved most of the clothes, but didn’t clean them any, so I have tons of wash to do. We’ve cleaned the mud and everything off of the floors, but everything in the house has a coating of dirt and grime on it. Some things are worse than others. I went to get a bowl out of one of the lower cabinets last night, one I thought was fine, but when I pulled the biggest bowl from the bottom of the stack, I found a little water in it and nasty dried stuff where it had been filled much more. I guess everything in the bottom cabinets will have to be pulled out and washed…. I probably should just wash every dish in the house. There’s just so much cleaning to do, and don’t we all hate housework to begin with. (Smile) We are still working in the yard too, cutting up fallen trees.

Now that I’m home and have my own computer and internet hookup back, I will finally be able to begin catching up on e-mail, hopefully by tomorrow. Of course I have a ton of messages to get through and I’m not even sure I got a lot of them. Seems sections of them, like a day or two’s wroth at a time, just never came through when I finally got where I could get to a computer and get mail. I also plan to be taking my place back over the RWC groups in the next few days or so. I’m sure the ladies who have worked so hard to watch over those groups and keep things going smoothly are sure glad to read that sentence after so long of a spell. (Smile) Now that I’m on my own computer, and can even get into my website and do an update on things when I have the time.

In other words, life is going to get back to normal here. I never realized what a great thing normal is.

Rita Go Away!

We only get one channel on our little portable black and white, and that’s a station out of Biloxi, Mississippi that we barely pick up. (New Orleans stations were our local channels here and they aren’t there any more. Even most of the radio stations we always listened too are gone.)

That one Mississippi television channel is enough for us to get news and to know that Rita is out there and will be in the Gulf soon. They have her path heading to Texas right now, but are saying that Louisiana isn’t in the clear and we won’t have a better idea for sure of what her path will be for a couple of days. I’m not wishing her on anyone, but the thought of another hurricane, another really bad one, hitting us right now is enough to make me want to curl up into a ball and stay there.

The last bad hurricane we took a direct hit from before Katrina came about twenty years ago, and even then it wasn’t as strong as her. They are saying that Rita won’t be as strong as Katrina either, but she’ll be close. With houses already damaged and trees and tin and wood every where still, if a hurricane hit here right now, even one a good bit weaker than Katrina, it would be a horror. All of that loose stuff would become deadly missiles in hurricane force winds. Trees and structures already weakened by the first strike would give way with ease. It’s just too awful to think of, so I’m trying really hard to just not think about it.

I mentioned yesterday that we started getting our local newspaper again at last, but then I found out later that they are only publishing it on Sunday’s and Wednesday’s. At least that does give us some local news and lets us know what’s going on here around us. We are getting mail daily, but it is a piece here and there. My sister mailed me something almost a week ago and I haven’t gotten it yet. It used to take about three days to get mail from her. Bills are coming in that were mailed just before the hurricane. Guess I should have known those would get through sooner or later no matter what. (Smile)

We went into our house yesterday with a pump sprayer like you would use on bugs or fruit trees, but we filled ours with bleach. We sprayed every where we dared and a few places we probably shouldn’t have. That mold is no doubt dying a painful death even as I type this…or maybe as I slept last night. We need to get it under control before we start ripping out sheetrock and insulation and flooring.

Sadly going through to spray meant looking close enough to find some things I had lost to the water that I hadn’t been in the house enough to notice or just hadn’t spotted or thought of until yesterday. Like some of my iron pots, things I had in the bottom of my hope chest, and even my huge collection of stamps that I kept in a big thick plastic box under my bed. The lid was floating on top of it and the inside was filled with water. I bought a lot of the stamps new, in what they called mint condition, but more than half of them were used stamps. I liked collected used ones, different pictures, different kinds, from different places. Thanks to a couple of dear friends, who are both gone now, I had used stamps in my collection from all over the world. I had sections that were made up of butterfly stamps, horse stamps, different shape stamps, you name it. I’m not sure what hurts worse, losing the stamps or the connection to those two dear lost friends I felt when I looked through the stamps they helped me find.

I hope we have found all of the ruined stuff now.

Before I post this I want to take a moment and say thanks to everyone who has called, posted a comment, or sent me an e-mail checking in, checking up, or just sending good wishes and thoughts or prayers. I know I haven’t had the chance to really respond to more than a couple or so, but every single call or message or comment has meant so very much to me and to my family.

Thanks from the bottom of our hearts! You’ve all made me feel so very special and cared for!