(written at 10pm CST on Wednesday 10/19/2005)
Finally, I found a place to donate the clothes. A church in Diamondhead has offered to take the clothing. They were no longer accepting donations, but when they heard we were from Seattle with fall / winter clothing, they made an exception for us. It was a huge relief. I was grinning ear to ear for the rest of the day.
I promised the church I would go around and hand out flyers. I’m going to go to those places where clothing is rotting in the street and drop off some flyers. The problem is no one knows where to go to get clothing. It’s all about word of mouth. It’s very frustrating for me to watch and hear stories along these lines.
While we were delivering the boxes, I saw my first computer science teacher. She was looking for clothing for her daughter who was in my high school class. I took all of my personal clothes from my closet and handed them to her.
After we got back, Casey, a reporter from Portland that contacted me via the blog, and I sync’ed up. He filmed for about 3 hours at the house and down at my childhood home.
It was very, very hard falling asleep last night. All the ghosts came back, after having talked about all my childhood memories. It didn’t bother me during the daylight talking to the camera, but trying to fall asleep, it did.
We’re going to sync up when I get back to Seattle. I’m going to email King5 with the info about the video our story about being down here, giving the donations and such.
Sicily’s pizza opened in Bay St. Louis last week, so we decided to eat there versus the waveland cafe. I never thought I would ever consider a pizza buffet to be fine dining, but apparently I wasn’t alone. The carpet had been pulled up, we were served on plastic-ware, and there were only canned drinks. But everyone there loved it. Everyone was so nice.
Then I saw Mr. Hull walk in. He was my Math teacher and athletic director in high school. I told him I would mail him my TI-92 calculator, since I haven’t used in since college. He was more than happy to take it off my hands. So, if you have any old graphing calculators you would like to donate to the high schools down there, let me know.
It’s “funny” how many people you meet here whenever a new restaurant opens up.
Tomorrow, we’re going to being the ritual “saying goodbye” to everyone, check email, since we weren’t able to do it today, take the last photographs, and so forth. We’re going to drive to Slidell or Gulfport for a nice goodbye dinner with my family.
I’m watching Wilma right now on one of the TV stations we can get with rabbit ears. This is crazy. It’s the strongest storm on record, and everyone down here knows it. There’s no way we can handle another hurricane. I want to say it would be disastrous, but then again, it is already disastrous down here. I’m not sure what you call a disaster that occurs after the apocalypse. Maybe we’ll simply call it “Wilma”