Random post

Driving in to work this morning, I saw a guy in a parachute floating around the Downtown sky. I lost track of him before I could get parked, so I have no idea where he landed. For a minute, I thought I'd hallucinated it, but then I asked the security guard standing outside my garage if he'd seen it. Thankfully he had. "What was that about?" I asked him. "Just some guy's idea of fun, I guess." "Yeah, but I want to know where he landed." "I want to know where he jumped from." Good point.

I was talking to one of my freelancers on the phone to find out when I could expect a story I'd assigned to him. He said he had wanted to get it done yesterday, but then Reuters had called and asked him to drive up to Dyer and Gibson counties to write about the tornadoes. "It was pretty bad, huh?" I asked Richard. "I saw things I'd only read about in books," he answered. "Let me give you a piece of advice. Do not try to survive a tornado above the ground." He said he had trouble wrapping his mind around the damage. A conversation with a farmer struck him later on after he'd left. "I had dairy cows," he told Richard. "I have no idea where they are." That's when Richard realized that, while driving around this rural area dominated by farms, he hadn't seen any cows, horses, cats, dogs. No livestock, he said. No birds, he said.

New thing to watch out for: Jesse has been trying his hardest to avoid changing his socks. I have to check his feet every morning to make sure he has on a clean pair. I have no idea why he's doing this.

We've had beautiful weather this week. Unfortunately Jesse and his schoolmates have had to stay inside their school building with all the blinds pulled down all day long. Why? Because anti-abortion protesters on campus have set up graphic display in the middle of campus. The letter Jesse's principal sent home to us last week also warned that there would be a truck carrying billboards with these images around the perimeter of campus during the week. So, no recess for the campus school kids. Nice.