Small Town Life

Over the Hunger Games weekend Emily and Claire got a taste of "small town life." Or maybe not. There was a small disturbance in the house at the end of my block on Friday night. We were trying to have an easy day Friday after the crazy that was the party and the midnight premier and I think we did an excellent job of taking it easy most of the day. But at 10:30pm a police officer came to the door and told us we needed to leave. Um...what?! There was a situation down the street and the house was not a safe distance away, so we were being asked to evacuate. Claire and I were already in our PJs so it was a mad dash to find some clothes! We decided to get some gas in Em's car and go hang out at the Wal-Mart in Carroll. My neighbor lady, Janet, said she'd keep me up to date and let us know when it was safe to come back. Well, after walking around Wal-Mart for what felt like eternity we ended up finding a room at the Super 8 so we could get some sleep. Two sleepless nights in a row tend to make us cranky! Janet did text us around 7:30am, but we were too sleepy to really get it. The next morning we slept as long as we could, ate lunch, and decided to see Hunger Games again. The movies are cheap here, and we wanted to make sure we were good before heading back to Manning.

Turns out there was a man having some mental trouble while carrying a shot gun and/or a pistol around the house. The police tried to quietly get things back to normal but the man wasn't cooperating. Around 7:30am Saturday morning the police finally threw some tear gas into the man's house and he came out and gave up. Nobody was hurt, THANK GOD. The man was sent to the hospital for observation/treatment and was eventually charged with something. I can't remember what. But nobody really had any intention of hurting anyone else, it was just a bad situation so they had to evacuate people.

It was funny, driving back into town people were mowing their lawns. Kids were riding their bikes. It looked like every other normal day. On Monday when we went back to school only half the staff/students seemed to know anything had happened over the weekend. It was a weird weekend.