Rainy Weekend

It's been raining for over 24 hours, but I've tried not to let it interfere with my plans for the weekend too much. Except for my plan to do laundry yesterday, because I haven't wanted to carry a basket of clothes through the rain to the laundry room, and it's too hard to juggle an umbrella and a full laundry basket. We're not into laundry danger territory yet, but in a few more days my reluctance to carry laundry through the rain may greatly lessen.

The weekend didn't start rainy. Saturday was actually sunny and hot when I got to campus for football:



Before we'd even gotten to kickoff, though, for our first home game of the season, disaster struck:



I guess they still play football in the rain, as long as there is no lightning, but if there is lightning then we have to clear the stadium until a half hour after the last lightning or thunder. Evacuating a hundred thousand people is surprisingly smooth and well orchestrated, and we usually send them to the basketball arena to ride out the storm, but this time it happened so fast that we let people stay in the gate areas:



Even with rain blowing in it was still dryer than being outside.

Eventually the lightning subsided and the game resumed, but I left after the end of the first quarter. I love the University and all, but I'm not sitting through rainy football just to prove it.

Sunday I didn't really do anything, other than read a book, watch a movie, play video games, and go to the store. It was a great day, except for the continued inability of the Kroger baggers to not mix hot food and cold food even though I very deliberately split them up on the conveyor belt at the register every single time. If they weren't cheaper than Food City I really might consider switching grocery stores, but I guess the low prices are the tradeoff I make for rage-inducing bagging.

This morning I had to go in to work for a minute.



Because sometimes I do. For no specific reason. And I don't want to say anything else about it, except that my plan for after work was to go walk down the Greenway by the Henley Street Bridge to see about taking some pictures. Although it was pouring, I took an umbrella and went anyway.

The Henley Street Bridge is one of three that connects Knoxville and South Knoxville, and is the one that I used to drive over every week to go to the comic store. Here it is in January 2010:



and here it is now, from almost the same angle:



Pretty much the entire bridge is gone. The arches are still intact:







but the roadway is completely gone, and the renovation and reconstruction is supposed to take two more years. In the meantime, there's a whole bunch of grey concrete, which looks even grayer in the pouring rain, and the whole thing has a kind of destroyed castle/post-apocolyptic feel.





It reminds me of pictures that you see of the bombed out parts of Europe after World War II; there's a lot of wreckage, and it's clear that a lot of things are gone, but the shapes of familiar things remain:









I also think I need to take more photo walks in the rain, even if it is hard to use a camera and an umbrella at the same time. It's peacful and quiet, and the pictures all end up with a streaky, grainy quality that I think I like.