Katrina'd

It's a little hard to write on more Tar Heel delights and fumbles when the drama in Louisianna and Mississippi keeps unfolding. Up here, where armories are being set up to house refugees for longer-term shelter, the weather has been achingly pleasant. We were supposed to get hit with Katrina on Tuesday, as its first prognosticated course was to send it along the spine of Appalachia. Instead, it veered left and then zoomed up to Canada, drawing in a ridge of high pressure that has kept us sunny and dry, though I think we all stayed indoors, glued to TV and the internet. Folks all around are exchanging bits of knowledge, lots of folks here have relatives further south. The only local drama seems to be the lines of SUV's making a run to the gas pumps in preparation for Labor Day, and the governor begging folks to curtail their driving, since the Carolinas only seem to have 3-5 days' worth of gas in the system. Apparently, we have our gas pumped up from the Gulf via two pipelines, both of which were damaged.
Small potatoes. I ran my finger through my sewing machine this afternoon (did you know that was possible?) The needle made a clean run through the fingernail of my left index and down the pad, miraculously avoiding the bone. I was rushing to put final stitches into a three-year quilt project before meeting Mike downtown. Well, for your information, it hurts less that getting it stuck in a door, and though my mind is still trying to get used to the idea of what happened, the finger looks fine. Hey, it wouldn't be a real quilt without some blood on it. I can tell you, it's hard to complain about anything.
It's interesting how our vocabulary evolves much like everything else, in puncutated equilibrium. Some catch words this year have been: tsunami, Acheh, Tikrit, Katrina. Exotic names that go from obscurity to stardom in less than a day, and will be used to define generational experiences.