Joann Foley

A friend of mine was in a spot and needed to borrow a few dollars. I felt the need to help her out, so I wrote a check for her to take to her bank. I assumed she would deposit my check and write a couple checks from her account to pay the bills. But it turns out that she does not have a bank account and needed to cash the check at my bank so she could buy money orders to pay her bills. Well, that didn’t turn out so good, as there are no local branches of my bank anywhere around where she lives. She had to give me back my uncashed check and just borrow money from a neighbor who had cash in hand.

That’s very frustrating – you would think that in today’s world there would be a better system of making places available to take care of your money matters.

This weekend we had a Crawfish Boil downtown that featured several different bands that played one after another for the entire day and well into the night. The festival is usually held downtown on the riverfront. But all this rain has caused the Cumberland River to overflow and Riverfront Park is mostly underwater. So they moved it to the parking lot south of LP Field, where the Tennessee Titans play football.

I have to admit that most of the bands were too obscure and too strangely alternative rock for my taste. But it was good to have some different music offered besides country, and the crawfish was a nice treat for this seafood starved city.

Today I was driving on the interstate and two cars passed me by in the passing lane. That in itself was perfectly OK, but I was going the 70 mph speed limit and the two cars passed me in a flash. They must have been going well over 100 mph and were obviously together or chasing each other. It all happened so fast I didn’t even notice their license plate numbers.

For a couple of years I was reading the weekly free newspaper because they ran a somewhat regular column by a local home inspector named Walter Jowers. I really like his writing style and his storytelling skill, and he makes good points about home construction, maintenance and repairs. But then he disappeared from that paper.

Well, by chance I was looking at a different alternative paper and found that his weekly column has found a new home. He will be writing for the City Paper every Thursday, which is extra cool because I can read that online and don’t have to go pick up the actual printed newspaper to read Walter’s columns.