good news!

not that this changes your lives in any way, but i am happy to report that Second Harvest was awarded a brand new 10' refrigerated truck today! we will use it for our Nashville's Table program which rescues excess prepared and perishable food from donors and redistributes it at no cost to our partner agencies. this means we can expand into our fifth county for this program! thanks to Ford Motor Company and Newman's Own who granted these trucks to eight food banks across the country.

guess who wrote that grant application? gotta love a job with tangible results.

and they didn't even let me take the rest of the day off.

i can explain, officer.

before i went out of town last weekend, i thought through what my car might need for the drive, like an oil change, etc. and i realized that my tags had expired. in january.

so on a day when i didn't have the time to take care of that, i had to take care of it. i started by looking up the TN DPS website to get a phone number so i could call and make sure i had everything i needed in hand before actually driving to the place. i call and this is what i hear: "the number you are dialing has been disconnected. please hang up and try again." it was a sign of things to come.

so i drive to the location listed on the DPS website under all the questions & answers about car registration and driver's license stuff. it happens to be in the same business park area as my office. i go in and they tell me that, while it is the right place to register a car for the first time, it is not the place to renew said registration. i need to go to the county clerk's office, which is nowhere nearby.

so instead i can go to the police precinct down the street. i stand in line there behind five other people renewing registration. when i get to the window, i remember that the state of tennessee requires an emissions test prior to renewal. the nice man gives me printed directions to the emissions testing place.

so i leave and follow the mapquest directions which, of course, dont mention the fact that a street name has changed. so a few extra miles later, i arrive at the emissions testing place. where i see a sign that reads, "$10. cash only." i have $7 in cash.

so i drive to the gas station down the street where i can't just over-pay $10 for my gas because they have an on-site atm machine. which charges me an extra $2 for using it.

my car passes the emissions test and i drive back to the police precinct. stand in line again, and hand the guy my paperwork. he looks puzzled. i say, "don't give me bad news." he says, "you aren't in the state's system. anywhere."

the week before this, i received in the mail an envelope stuffed with copies of letters from the state which were backdated throughout the entire last year. i never received the originals in the first place, mind you. the final letter was a denial of my request to register my car in the state of tennessee.

so it seems my registration has been invalid for quite some time. we think we figured out that the credit union in texas didnt respond to the state's request for the car title a year ago. or the state never requested it in the first place. who knows.

the nice man says, "you are in metro's system, but technically i am not supposed to renew this for you since you aren't in the state's system." i explain that i didnt want a million dollar ticket out of state that weekend that i would later have to defend in person. he says, "okay, but if it comes up, you don't know me."

and guess what? when i get the title, i will have to pay the $79 again to register it correctly. if that is more than three months from now, i will also have to pay the $10 emissions test again. and once i move tomorrow, i will live in a different county, which also requires re-registration. i'll be saving all three of those things to do at once, so here's hoping i don't get pulled over between now and then.

in case you didn't know, the state is not required to mail your registration renewal to you. they do it "as a courtesy," so you are still responsible for making sure you are up to date whether or not they mail it to you. the five people in line ahead of me had not received theirs in the mail. of course, i didn't receive mine because they didn't know i was driving in their state.

home sweet h... apartment.

i've got no news to share with the world these days, other than that i am moving into an apartment in a nearby city this weekend and i can hardly wait. most of my stuff is conveniently still packed from the last move. [insert ugly comment from cole]

i am looking forward to space and peace and quiet, using my furniture that has been in storage for a year, the nice view, the vaulted ceilings, and walls i can paint.

when i went by the new place tonight, i heard a yappy dog in the apartment across from mine. that is not okay with me. i chose the third floor so that, for once, *I* could be the loud upstairs neighbor. i didn't count on loud across-the-breezeway-neighbor's dog.

it sounded like a freight train*

you can now read my blog without fear of experiencing "katrina fatigue." you may, however, experience "tornado fatigue" seeing as how countless twisters roared through my city yesterday. the church you see in the picture with the story on msnbc.com is about five miles from my house.

my church was planning another trip to louisiana this month, but shifted focus to west tennessee in response to last week's storms, and has now scratched that to take care of our own. earlier i was with about twenty people who spent the day sorting through trees and debris, ironically, at the home of the woman who has spearheaded the trips to louisiana. her home is fine, minus some shutters, but she and her husband lost two barns and contents, more trees than we could count, and some chickens who are probably really confused right about now.

goodlettsville, hendersonville, and ashland city (where i lived when i was little) are terribly hard-hit. gallatin is unbelieveable. miles and miles of homes and businesses and schools and hospitals are splintered. interstate 65 was shut down for quite a while yesterday and is still moving at a snail's pace, i guess because of all the cars, trees, and debris that have been tossed in the way. plus people keep coming up here just to look around, which doesn't help at all.

special thanks to the nice woman at target who whisked me through at a closed cash register this morning when she saw that i was buying a case of bottled water, pairs of work gloves, and batteries instead regular saturday stuff.

special thanks to E for taking me in when i couldn't get home on friday.

and a most special thanks to God for protecting my family and friends on a day when many families are grieving the unexpected loss of at least 36 people this week.

*what the tv-interviewed women in pink hair rollers and men in camo coveralls say is true. it does, in fact, sound like a freight train.