Casa De Morrill

This weekend I was in Atlanta. Well, correction, I drove to Atlanta Friday, spent Saturday in Rome, Georgia and then Sunday back in Atlanta until I decided it was time to head home. The drive to Atlanta wasn’t too bad. It took me an extra 30 minutes, but that was due to the nasty rain that I hit for a good chunk of the drive. I got to see Sean Friday night when he finally made it to Atlanta from Johnson City. It was really nice getting to see him again, seeing as he’d been gone since last Sunday up in Tennessee for work.

Saturday morning, we woke up at a pretty reasonable hour and headed over to Rome for Berry College’s Mountain Day. It’s Amy’s last semester at Berry, so we all figured it would be especially nice to make it over for her last Mountain Day. We spent the rest of the day over in Rome with Amy. I got to see her senior design project. It’s quite cool. She and her dad hooked up Lego Mindstorms to a pottery wheel and programmed them to adjust the speed of the wheel at random intervals. The reason? To reflect on how life changes randomly and we make what we can out of what we get. So, the final output will be pottery made while the wheel changes speeds randomly. So far, she’s gotten one good, if a little thick, bowl out of the project. The rest have ended with rather gruesome ends, but then again, that’s life. We do what we can with what we get. I’m really looking forward to seeing her show.

Sunday, Lisa and I headed back down to New Natalie’s to try on some more wedding dresses. The decision is getting harder and harder. We’ve found the style of dress that looks best on me. So, this time I just picked out dresses from that style and tried them on. They all looked quite lovely. I have my favorite of the lot, but I love the other ones quite well, too. It’s going to be a very, very hard decision in the end. Sean and I also did a bit of shopping Sunday and had dinner at Alessio’s before we decided I needed to get home.

The drive home was the really interesting part. I got a beautiful lightening show between Atlanta and Adairsville. At one point in the drive, though, I got a big scare. The lightening struck not 10 feet from where my car was. I could hear the crackle in the air and see the light. It was absolutely amazing, but terrifying as well. As I reach the Adairsville city limit, the bottom drops out of the clouds finally and more lightening strikes. I pull into the QuikTrip to fill up on gas before finishing my journey and the lights go out. Damn. Thankfully, they came back on pretty quickly. I filled up on gas, grabbed a cup of the insta-french-vanilla-cappucino and hit the road again. I was hoping to make a quick run through the rain clouds and get out to the other side pretty quickly. Right. As I’m driving out of Adairsville, I got the grand finale to my lightening show. Three transformers blew out in series. I saw the bolt of lightening hit the first transformer. A bright white light burned for a few seconds from the transformer and then as it was dying, I could see the next one down the line start to sizzle and then burn brightly as well. Then, the third. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I just feel sorry for the people who didn’t have power after that grand finale. The rest of the drive home was filled with mostly torrential rains with winds that got pretty nasty at points and then lots of lightening, so that I would of course have to constantly readjust my night vision. Thankfully, the rain cleared up by the time I got to Scottsboro and the last 45 minutes of my drive was pretty boring. I set the cruise control at 73 and just mindlessly drove the rest of the way home.

I called Sean when I got to Huntsville, made the rest of the way home as quickly as possible and then just crashed into bed. May I never again complain about the drive between here and Atlanta again.

This post and my staying awake thanks to:
- insta-french-vanilla-cappucino
- cherry coke
- water
- a bag of Reese’s pieces