tornado blog post number three

Day 40 tornado update

June 6, 2011

To recap, April 27, 2011 a tornado hit Tuscaloosa, including my house. You can find two previous blog posts on this subject here:

http://dreamsandnightmaresmagazine.blogspot.com/2011/05/to-extent-that-blessings-are-available.html

That is a link to the second post, which contains a link to the first post.

More recap. Since the tornado I have written a bunch of haiku in response. At first I numbered of them sequentially and lately I have been numbering them according to the number of days that have elapsed since the storm. They are not hard to find and they are all in this blog.

Things have been moving slowly but we have stayed busy. Just yesterday, the city center crew to pick up all the debris from our front yard. This included more bits of wood from the house and the stump of the little oak tree. This is the one that actually hit the house. Debris remains in the side yard, primarily the stump of the medium-sized oak tree, the stump of the big oak tree (8 foot diameter at the base; okay, maybe 7 feet), and a great deal of the big oak tree cut up into manageable portions of a few tons or less each. What's left of our backyard carport (actually used for storage of outdoor stuff), the root ball of a black walnut tree, and the sword of Damocles in the form of hanging branches of a neighbors pin oak remains in the backyard. The city will not remove stuff from the backyard.

Today I am going to call one contractor and tell him we have decided to accept his offer to repair the carport and the attached one-room office. He said he would clean up all the debris back there if we hired him to repair that stuff. Saturday we met with another contractor, who is going to repair the hole in the roof. He explained how to get a building permit and we plan to do that today. I have a lot of other things to do than do today, some connected with tornado repairs. I'll talk about that in my next blog post about this, after they have been successfully completed (I hope).

In the meantime family has visited, and more family visits this week so that we can hold a memorial service for my father (greatly delayed, but finally almost here). No time for more talk right now.