The Country Music Hall of Fame After the Flood
Brooks & Dunn, the most successful duo in country music history, will be performing their last concert next Thursday. Since one of their hit songs was “That Ain’t No Way to Go”, they wanted to go out with style, and they are. Proceeds from their last show will go to benefit the Country Music Hall of Fame, which was hit hard by the May Flood. That definitely IS a classy way to go.
View of the sunset from the kitchen window of the new Casa De Shepard.
In another welcome sign of progress, Nashville’s Gibson guitar factory has announced that it is back up and running at full speed, cranking out about 250 guitars a day. The first one to roll off the post-flood production line was given as a birthday present to former Guns-N-Roses guitarist Slash.
Guitar Town is slowly rising again.
I Would Have Never Guessed from Looking at the Outside that this Vehicle Would Be Totalled
Next, we need to replace the Chevy van that held up fine for the well over 200,000 miles we put on it, but couldn’t survive 4 feet of flood water. The Chevy Express van that I drive on the road now will actually replace the mail van (this black one was originally my road van), and I’ll buy a new one for myself. I already went to more Honda dealerships than I can count, and told each sales rep that if he’d find me a burgundy Odyssey with tan leather interior, navigation system, and less than 20,000 miles, I’d bring him a check. But that was apparently too much work for all of them :0
We’ve been in the new house for two weeks now, and Brady has been one nervous little puppy dog the entire time. I think it’s because he can tell that a Rottweiler used to live here, and he has a slight case of Little Dog Syndrome. But tonight he apparently decided the big dog is never coming back and finally let his guard down. (Or perhaps that I’d protect him if it does. He’s always 10 feet tall and bulletproof when he’s in my lap).
Here’s another example of a technology issue I never saw coming. Prior to the flood, we were using high level consumer grade video cameras, purchased off the shelf from Circuit City and CompUSA, to record straight to hard drives for editing. They connected by IEEE 1394 cable (“Firewire”) that allows audio and video to be streamed without any degradation of the signal. Circuit City and CompUSA are both out of business now, so when I went to buy a new camera to replace one of the two that were lost in the flood, I learned that no retail stores in Nashville carry video cameras with Firewire jacks any more. The sales rep at Best Buy assured me that a USB cable would do the same.
But after I returned with the new camcorder he sold me, I discovered that AVCHD camcorders cannot stream compressed video in real-time like an HDV camera can. So we ordered an HDV camera from B&H Photo on New York City, with a Firewire jack and external mic jack, and now have a non-returnable AVCHD camcorder I have absolutely no use for. Anybody know of a good charity that shoots lots of video?
Between moving into the new house, and working through the huge pile of debris the floodwaters washed into our 40-foot high warehouse at work, I occasionally find small but meaningful momentos that I didn’t know I if I still had. This is one of them. It’s a magic prop given to me by Jillette Penn of Penn & Teller (I loooooooove magic shows) when I was in Vegas last January. It makes up a little for the box of Junior Mints, given to me by the real life Kramer when I was in New York City (ask a Jerry Seinfeld fan to explain), that were sitting on the same shelf and didn’t survive the flood.
Here’s an example of what I mean when I say that a house is so much more than a home to a road warrior, it’s a refuge of serenity and safety where the world makes perfect sense. Our new master bedroom has French doors opening directly onto a patio, and we weren’t sure if we’d like that. WRONG! This is what we’ll see when we get up in the mornings. I call it our Garden of Eden.
Our Garden of Eden
Unlike the house we put under contract in February only to see wash away in the flood 4 days before we were to close in May, the closing on our new house went off seamlessly in less than 3 weeks.
Since we didn’t take out a mortgage (a true Dave Ramsey house), I made doubly sure that every “i” was dotted and every “t” crossed, and even paid extra for enhanced title insurance. Our realtor, Don Lee, understood my nervousness, and asked Mary Frances Rudy, owner of the title company, to do this closing personally.
Both illustrated how true professionals operate. Mary Frances knew that I would want to know about her personally (since the cashier’s check was made out to her firm), and not just about her credentials as a well-respected Nashville attorney.
As it turned out, she had quite a bit of personal experience with checks much larger than ours. Her dad owned Rudy’s Farm, which was once home to the Rudy Sausage Company that he later sold to Sara Lee. He also sold part of has farm to Gaylord Entertainment, and it is where the Grande Ole Opry and Opryland Hotel sit today.
This is the big moment when I took out my special pen, made of Old Hickory wood from The Hermitage (the estate of President Andrew Jackson, just outside Nashville), and signed the final document.
The Big Moment
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And this is my very happy bride, and my very happy realtor afterward.
My Realtor Presenting My Beautiful Bride with a Celebratory Bottle of Wine
Every time I see TV coverage of people cleaning oil off birds from the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it reminds me of the new term we all learned here in Nashville – ‘”Flood Mud”. Since we still have a warehouse full of files and equipment to clean once we can move back into our offices, most of the personal mementos have been ignored. But yesterday I recovered the only thing that the flood waters didn’t carry away off my bookcases – my miniature Corvette collection. Not big progress, but as Dave Ramsey says, Baby Steps, Baby Steps…
