The area reported on in this newspaper story on the tornados begins just over the ridge from my house and ends five miles away. Not reported here is the home destroyed and several others damaged two miles from me in the opposite direction.

One thing that’s kept me occupied this past week was preparing for the start of the Locally Grown Cooperative, a collective effort of several area natural farms. Yesterday, the website went live and features an on-line ordering system where people in the Athens area can purchase produce from us. It’s kind of like a virtual farmers’ market. This kicks off the marketing effort, and we’ll follow that up with educational opportunities and other community-centered events.

About two this afternoon, I heard the National Weather Service issue a tornado warning for Franklin county, Georgia, my home county. Then they listed the towns in the path of the tornado and I realized that my house lay in the exact line of the storm. A quick click over to wunderground.com later (the best weather site that I’ve found), and I got to watch the live radar feed as it showed the small cell move directly over my piece of the map – I was at work, twenty-some miles away. I quickly got in the car and raced home, to make sure I still had one. I just made it out of Athens when a small funnel came out of the clouds and crossed the road a mere couple hundred yards in front of me. All of the traffic instantl pulled over and stopped – the funnel clearly had right of way. The emergency broadcast system began reciting a tornado warning as I said aloud, “I see it, I see it.” Only after it completed did I realize they were warning about a tornado another ten miles up the road. The warning about the one I stopped for didn’t come until a couple minutes later. It was a slow drive home, as you can imagine. Trees were down across the highway, visibility at times was zero (I pulled over then), and I managed to get behind some semi-trailers going under 20 mph even when the storm let up. As I got close to home, the damage became more apparent. One old farmhouse not far from me had one old oak tree on its porch and another in its living room. My immediate neighbor had the roofs peel off two of his large chicken houses (each one holds tens of thousands of chickens). Another neighbor had a pole barn go down. My house – was fine. A few tree limbs here and there, standing water everywhere, the plastic covering ripped off the greenhouse, but generally OK. Even the neighbor with the single-wide trailer sitting on five-foot high columns of concret block was fine. So the worst of it skipped over us. I don’t know how much water fell, but it had to be a whole bunch. All of the tall grass on the property is flattened. The soil is beyond saturated. And, a bucket that was sitting inside the barn, five feet from an open window, had three inches of water in it.

R.I.P., Old Man in the Mountain.

Gillian Clark is the chef and co-owner of Colorado Kitchen in Washington, D.C. Inan open letter to the Washington Post, she explains why she refuses most every request for special service at her restaurant. It’s quite a good read, and the resulting MetaFilter discussion is worth checking out as well.

The servers often hate to say no to the customer that insists that I broil the crab cakes or deep fry their flounder. I explain to them that they are in my restaurant. And they must have the flounder the way I make it. Personally, I prefer the way Herbert von Karajan conducts Beethoven’s Third Symphony. But I would never ask Zubin Mehta to finish the Adagio with the hesitant 3/8 that Herb finishes with. Nor would I stop a production of Hamlet and ask them to insert a couple of lines from Macbeth because I think they go well in there.

“First Day at Market”

This past weekend saw our first day at market for the year. We didn’t have much – just radishes, carrots, parsnips, and seedlings – but it was good to be back. Amazingly, I sold all 50 pounds of radishes. I got many great comments, too. My favorite: “I’m glad you’re back. You always have the most avant garde table!”

“Bee Condos” This week’s Photo Friday topic is shadows.

You know how a tooth way back in the back cracks some (because you have too many teeth in your head for how much jaw you have [but you can’t cough up the several thousand dollars the dentists want to fix the problem because the dental insurance you used to have got canceled when the parent company went bankrupt right after you paid up through the 24 month waiting period required for major oral surgery] and the pressure finally caused the tooth to snap) and little pieces have fallen off exposing the nerves a bit, and how “some discomfort” arises, but you just have to put up with it because the dental discount plan you found doesn’t take effect until May 1st (and on top of that you have to find a new dentist nowhere near you because no dentists within 60 miles accept the plan, meaning you’ll have to transfer all your records from the good local dentist you like and spend half a day driving for several appointments)? Yeah. I hate it when that happens.

“Rainy Morning” This week’s Photo Friday topic is water.

Proof that you can find anything and everything on the internet, exhibit #18529: “Hello, and welcome to my homepage. My name is Ulrich Haarbürste and I like to write stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped up in cling-film.”