Quoting from 'Alabama storytelling legend Kathryn Tucker Windham dies at 93'

"She was an absolute legend," Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian and professor emeritus at Auburn University, said today. "She was certainly the premiere storyteller in Alabama, and maybe one of the premiere storytellers in the South ... And, of course, she was a bang-up good journalist."

I've left a tab for this article open on my laptop ever since I first read it.  I wasn't sure if I should just tag it on delicious so it would show up on solecist.net, but you know what?  This is just too damned weird to leave unacknowledged.  For the non-squeamish, (you've been warned!) or just those who delight in the foibles of human nature and/or northern Alabama, read on from this al.com article:

In the living room, Gareth works on code and listens to David Gray. In the computer room, I switch back and forth between working on code and working on this post, hoping that no one is noticing that I've been gradually notching up the volume on the techno every few minutes.

The walls just need to shake a little bit. A little bit of shake and the code shall flow forth.

After another night of delayed sleep, I made a thoroughly wavering, uncertain decision today to limit how much information I took in about the destruction in New York.

We bandy about the phrase "too much information," but in this case, it can be all too true. For each person it's different—but we each know when it happens—the moment when we know too much, and it's more than we can handle, emotionally or intellectually.I reached my moment about twenty-four hours ago over a specific, painful piece of information. For me, it was learning about a particular incident that the networks all have on videotape but refuse (rightly) to show. Even knowing of its existence was more than I could take. Jeff knows what that particular image was, but I will not repeat it here, for repetition is salt for the wound, not solace.

The god of smaller things gave me a gift today: for cleaning up my kitchen this evening, I discovered the tiny battery-powered radio that I had given up for lost a few weeks ago.

While in this house, this radio had become a daily link with the world. Our large stereo has trouble tuning in to the weak signal of WLRH, our local NPR affiliate. But the little one does not, and I can carry it around the house with me as I do chores.Through it, I listened to Morning Edition in the mornings, and All Things Considered in the afternoon. I've found their news to be much less sensationalist and more in-depth than anything else I can get locally.