March 18, 2008

The View From Here

The Family Room where we spend most of our time.

There is a bunch of noise and commotion emanating from the Lanai, Annabelle has discovered that Makoa is fun to play with, but the play must be carefully supervised. It reminds me of a monkey pulling the tail of a tiger. The tiger swats and stalks the nuisance and sometimes connects with the swipe of a paw, POW!... Annabelle barks at the cats and trying to get them to play with her, but usually it gets a bit crazy and the puppy runs to me or Woody wanting to get picked up. Often I ignore her until the very last moment, because she is usually the cause of the ruckus...

Except on the very coldest of days we spend most of our time in this space we created out of the screened in porch known as a "Bella Vista Room" as this was a design feature in nearly all of the older homes built here. Many like us, enclosed the semi insulated space and turned them into family rooms. On rainy days like this it is the place where Annabelle comes to do her business on a pad and get some much needed exercise. Shes filling out and weighed in at the vet (she had a tick and I needed to learn how to get them out, it was very interesting but that bug was disgusting. I now know what the word "parasite" truly means.)

We have had days and days of rain here and some of the first major flooding I have ever seen here in Arkansas. You know the commercial about flood insurance, where the people say that they dont live in a flood zone and are calmly sitting in their living rooms as the water is taking all of their stuff our the door? Woody and I kept looking at each other and we swore that we would check on flood insurance.

The sun came out today but the water is still draining off of the hillsides and is pouring out of spillways and normally dry creekbeds at a torrential rate. Golf courses, and parks are under water and a numbur of structures have been undermined by the flooding. It will be days before we get back to normal. For us we can see a lot of erosion and top soil loss in our back area and Woody says he will have someone out to look at things once he gets back from driving me to Louisville. Our neighbors covered their entire yard with gravel to stop it from sliding down hill. We might need to do the same

Spillway out of Lake Bella Vista. This was taken before the storms this week, the water flow has doubled and was above the bridge. This becomes Big Sugar Creek which flows into the White river, then on to the mighty Mississippi

We are fine, and wanted friends and family to know that since the news reports were looking pretty bad in some areas of Northwest AR

Preparing for my departure April 1. I nearly have all of my things packed up. Clothing is the bulk of it. Still chilly there and will get back to that before I come back home. I am taking as much as I think I will need so I dont have to buy anything I might already own. Money is going to be a lot tighter than I thought as the surging price of gold is jacking every cost up and up.

I am also hualing all of my Nutrisystem food that I have here with me. I have gained most of the weight back that I lost last summer due to lack of exercise and eating out most of the time. Frankly I gave up caring about it. My health has suffered as a result, so I am going back on while I am there we shall see how things go with that. The sleep disorder issue has reared its ugly head and it got a lot better with getting the extra weigh off again its life and death so I need to just do it and stick with it. My concern is what do I do to keep it off... We shall see once I get there

Labels: Annabelle, Bella Vista, Louisville, weather