Rita and the Demo

I don't know if the DSL will stay up long enough for me to post this, but here goes. Seems there's a major trunk line down in Texas.

We did a silversmithing demo in the face of Hurricane Rita Saturday. As part of our obligation to the Mississippi Craftsmen's Guild, we have to do an outdoor crafts demo in Jackson once a year. When we first discussed the event with the Guild, they asked us to demo for a whole weekend and offered to put us up in a hotel room. Our faces lit up the way only the faces of parents of small children can at that idea. We looked at our calender and picked the last weekend of September for the demo. Summer's heat would have broken by then, and the weather looked like it would be pleasant.

First there was the question of what aspect of silversmithing to cover. The site is basically a picnic area with a crafts store. Smithcraft involves fire, water, noxious chemicals, big heavy pieces of equipment and lots of little parts that can get blown away by a good breeze. That's why smithies were invented in the first place. Finally we decided to take some mold-carving and pewter-casting supplies.

Then Katrina blew in and blew away our hotel reservation. All the Jackson hotels were full of refugees from the coast. We reorganized for a day trip.

Rita thought it was a good day to go visiting as well. When we dropped off the girls with their great-aunt for the day, her house was full of cousins from Texas. That was the most people we saw all day. Jackson was practically deserted, except for the turnoff to the mall which was so packed traffic had backed up onto the interstate and ground to a complete halt. We saw maybe a dozen people and spent most of our time watching the sky, waiting for the second band of rain to start . The first band would just be a prelude, but the second band would announce the storm was immenent.

The second band arrived around 3 p.m. We picked up the girls and found out they had learned a frustrating but important lesson in the pack behavior of children who attend schools. Then we came on home.