50 counties in Tennessee requested disaster recovery relief from the US government. 21 people died. According to Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, damage estimates in Davidson county alone were well over 1.5 billion dollars.  Countless homes and businesses were flooded with many completely submerged.  Interstate 40 was closed for several days in spots because water from the Harpeth river flooded the road.

Then on May 3rd, the Army Corps of Engineers began releasing water from the many dams on the Harpeth and Cumberland rivers in order to protect the dam infrastructure.  This is when the water rose in Nashville, causing the lower part of the city and many neighborhoods in the area on the rivers banks to be flooded.  The Grand Ole Opry, Bridgestone Arena (where the Nashville Predators play hockey) and Titans Stadium were partly flooded among the many tourist and buildings of interest in the area.

One result of this release of water meant that the Cumberland, which flows northeast would flood even worse downstream from Nashville.  One of the hardest hit counties was the neighboring county of Cheatham as the Cumberland flowed out of its banks and flooded vast regions of the county for several days.  This is where my story begins.

You see, Nashville has the biggest spirit of volunteerism I’ve ever seen.  It is common to see folks show up when people have tornado damage, from cities and counties in the area, just because “people need help”.  There are several online volunteer organizations including Hands On Nashville, that help coordinate when people need help.  I went to the website during the week and looked at what volunteer opportunities existed.  I picked a listing for a family in Cheatham county that needed help with “flood cleanup”, saved the directions and planned my Saturday.

I had seen all of the flood coverage on TV.  I had friends on Twitter and at work who had sustained flood damage and I had their first hand accounts of dealing with both the actual flood and the aftermath.  What I saw, however, as I drove thru the rural part of Cheatham county didn’t prepare me for what I found at this family’s home.

First, the road was still covered in 4-6 inches of mud and it was still wet.  If you looked thru the treeline along the road to the treeline across a hay field of several hundred acres, the mud IN the treeline was as clear as day and clearly meant the water was 5-10 feet above ground level and covered the whole neighborhood.  I later found out that the trailer home where I was had water up to the top of the trailer.  And, it wasn’t until the end of the day that I realized the street ran parallel to the Cumberland and the water was only 20-30 feet below the yard down the bank.  In otherwords, the Cumberland was 30-40 feet above where it was that day and had covered a square mile or more of land!

The family and the few volunteers that arrived were stripping the contents of the house out into the yard and carrying all of the unsalvageable stuff to the other side of the road for flood debris removal by the county.  Clothing and dishes and such were set aside to dry.   There was a small garden shed that had floated up over a small picket fence, turned upside down and was wedged between a chainlink fence and a small tree.

Shortly after I arrived, we turned to the garage/workshed that was next to the trailer.  It hadn’t been opened yet.  When we first tried to enter, the stench from sodden and rotting paper, wood and other materials was such that without a face mask, being in the room was not possible.  It was an odor of mildew, mud, and rot.  The floor was covered in mud and a strange muck and white bits.  I finally realized that the muck was the insulation from the ceiling that had the flood waters had flooded past, causing the drywall to pull away from the drywall nails and the white bits were actually the white texture beads in the “popcorn” ceiling paint.  It was as if a room sized snowglobe had been shaken violently and the glass broken, letting the white beads and such to simply settle on the floor.

And, that wasn’t all that was on the floor.  The building had been filled with furniture, boxes of all kinds of “stuff”, tools, toys, etc.  All of this stuff was now in a giant jumble, again, as if the room had been shaken violently.  We set about emptying the room.  It was a mess.  The muck and detritus from the flood made the task almost impossible.  With only a single door to move thru, it meant one person at a time coming and going.  Because of the nature of the doorway floor, wheelbarrows were not easy to use.

Slowly, in the humid heat of the afternoon, we emptied the room and eventually got to where we were shoveling the muck into the one wheelbarrow we had to dump it outside.  Aside from the members of the family and their friends, we didn’t talk much.  We just worked and worked.  The goal was to get as much of the muck and mess out of the interior to allow the building to dry out.  Mold is a huge problem in this situation.  In fact, if you drove around many of the areas hit by the flood, you’d be struck by the mounds of drywall and such on the curb awaiting pickup.  This was the best way to fight the mold that was quickly growing EVERYWHERE.

Finally, I was able to see that most of the heavy work was done and I was able to say my goodbye and wish the family the best, given the situation.  The father hugged me and thanked me for coming to their aid.  We were both almost in tears.  I was honored to have come out to help a total stranger.  It is a day I will never forget.

If you have followed my blog recently, you know I participated in Gwen Bell’s Best of Blog Challenge 2009 in December. I tried to recap my year thru the 31 topics she laid out for the monthlong blogging challenge.

The highlights of my year include:

• Watching Barack Obama be sworn in as President of the United States and knowing my daughter was in attendance.
• Learning to kayak and joining my friends on 6 different rivers in Middle Tennessee and taking the rope swing of my life.
• Going to Barcamp Nashville 2009 and attending some mind-blowing sessions.
• Really starting to use Twitter and understand the utility and reach of it.
• Making new friends based on my attendance at Barcamp.
• Discovering new blogs that are changing my life: Zen Habits, My Wife Quit Her Job, Gwen Bell.
• Learned about Kiva.org and even used my 45th birthday as a catalyst for helping others have a better life.
• Created a website dedicated to helping other people achieve their dreams: The Dream Shepherd
• Joined Postcrossing and sent 68 postcards around the world and received back 64 postcards for a combined travel distance of almost 1 million miles!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsGZHoAImY

These are the highlights of 2009 for me.  2010 will see these things continue and expand.  My goals for 2010 include:

• Meeting many of my Twitter friends so that I can make them real life friends, including: Lauren, Nikki, Joi, Mirjam and Gail.
• Expand on my Kiva activities with a year long birthday celebration.  I want to turn up the giving by a factor of ten.
• Expand my new website and create a “store” to start  secondary income stream.
• Keep control of my weight.  I lost 50 lbs in 08 and it’s starting to come back.
• Do better to stay in touch with friends and family.
• Mostly, just try to stay positive and work to make life better for others.

So, stay tuned to my blog.  You’ll not only see my progress, but you will also help me stay focused on my goals.  I’ve learned that doing things completely alone isn’t the best way to succeed.  Your support and well wishes do much to keep me motivated.

Peace!

I think that the biggest lesson I learned all year is that I can’t let my shyness rule my actions.  I have always felt the need to hold back and not make a scene.  Here’s how shy I can be – it can be my birthday and I can be celebrating at home with friends and family.  As soon as they bring out the cake with candles lit and start singing the birthday song TO ME, I want to run and hide.  Another shy example was when I was in high school and even in college and taking foreign languages (I studied German, Latin and Ancient Greek in college to support my History degree) if we had to practice speaking in class, I was always really afraid to speak to my neighbors because it felt like a performance.  So, you can see that shyness has had a profound effect on my life.

I believe my shyness really started when I was in grade school.  There were two events that shattered my young ego and set the stage for what I described above.  First, my second grade teacher sent me to another classroom to retrieve the big can of scissors for an art project and when I entered the classroom and interrupted the lesson, the teacher asked me what I wanted and I replied, “Can I have the scissors?” to which she replied, “I don’t know, can you?” which garnered a huge laugh from the students (also second graders and many were my friends) which embarrassed me and caused me to correct myself and ask, “MAY I have the scissors?”  Now, I understood she was trying to teach a “lesson” in grammar, but the humiliation of being called out like that in front of my friends was horrifying.

The second event occurred after it got out that I had a picture of one of my classmates, a VERY popular girl in my class, in my wallet.  Mind you, this was the second or third grade.  Girls had cooties back then.  But, nonetheless, I really thought she was cute and so I kept her picture in my wallet.  One day, in a fit of stupidity, I let it be known to a couple of the boys in the class about this and before I knew it, she found out.  Then, a day or so later, as we were lining up as a class (boys and girls) to go in from recess, she loudly announced to me, in front of our whole class, how she hated my guts.  Needless to say, if I could, I would have melted into the ground right there, but I didn’t.  Again, everyone thought this was the height of hilarity, accept me of course.  Ahh, the joy of youth.

So, why am I admitting all of this?  Because I attended a one day “un-conference” known as BarCamp.  BarCamp is a day long series of sessions devoted to tech and geek topics like blogging, social media, podcasting, digital media, etc. and one of the sessions I attended as a session called “Networking in Nashvegas” which was a fancy name for a session on how to mingle and build relationships, particularly business relationships.  And, during this session, the two ladies giving the talk asked if anyone was shy.  Of course, being the honest guy I am, I raised my hand.  Naturally, they called on me and a person named Hannah and asked us to come forward.  They then proceeded to roleplay with us about how to break your shyness and “mingle” based on the body language of the other people we might try to meet or mingle with.  And, because of their open, honest approach and the advice they gave, I found that it’s actually quite easy to overcome my shyness in many situations where before I would be afraid of being noticed or speaking out in a crowd of strangers.

Because of BarCamp and this session in particular, I have started to make friends in the Nashville “tech/geek” community and to develop a good network of business contacts that will only get better and richer as time progresses.  I have joined the Nashville Geek Breakfast group that meets monthly for breakfast and networking.  And, I have even volunteered to be part of the spring “un-conference” known as PodCamp for 2010.  Finally, after over 35 years of avoiding the spotlight and any kinds of confrontation, I am finally out and facing the world with a new sense of “self” and the knowledge that it’s perfectly OK to be me and if the world doesn’t like it, well, it’s not my problem.

Because of this, I simply can’t decide on just one. I will, instead, just say that because of the places I have been with friends, I am now much more open to new foods and new places. It’s not that I didn’t have some “non-tradtional” foods that I enjoy. I have enjoyed sushi for most of my life. I am also a connoisseur of other Asian and Mexican genres.

But, now, I can add Ethiopian, Vietnamese and Indian to my taste palate. So, here’s to new food experiences and the friends which share them with us.

What is BarCamp Nashville you ask??? Well, from the official website:

BarCamp is Nashville’s free “un”-conference for the digital and technical community. The BarCamp format was brought to Nashville by Marcus Whitney and Dave Delaney in 2007. It’s free to attend — thanks to our generous sponsors — and the un-conference format encourages community learning: attendees are also encouraged to sign up to present a session. (Did we mention it’s free?)

BarCamp has become the premier technology conference in Nashville, bringing together the best minds and representation of the hottest companies in the internet, entrepreneurial, new media, and software industries, among others. Over 300 people attended the first year, and 2008′s attendance was nearly double. We’re projecting great growth for 2009. Sign up today to attend, and consider signing up to speak as well!

Pretty cool, huh?!?! It was 7 hours of sessions, all 30 minutes in length with lunch available and even drinks from the bar! There were sessions on everything from blogging and podcasting to programming for the web and the iPhone to legal issues surrounding digital content and even how to network at gatherings. Dave Delaney gave a tremendous talk about what happens to your online presence after you pass on entitled, “We’re all going to DIE!!”

I have attended various conferences and workshops in the past and I can honestly say that BarCamp was far and away more informative and beneficial than any other “professional” event I’ve ever attended. We, here in Nashville, have a vibrant and active “tech” community that seeks to not only encourage collaboration among the many tech folks and companies in the area but also to put Nashville on the tech “map” so that we can not only grow the tech community but so that our community can be a leader in innovation in the tech community at large.

I originally heard about this conference from a friend (one of my kayaking buddies) who was on the planning committee for this year’s BarCamp. She suggested I should come since she knew I was looking for something better to do for a “job” and knew that at the very least, I’d have an opportunity to get some good information but also to meet some like-minded tech savvy “geeks”. And, let me tell you, she was absolutely right.

Thru BarCamp, I have made a number of new friends. And, this might sound weird, but for the first time in my 45 years, these friends were NOT related to my work or my school or my family. For the first time in my adult life, I’m making friends without the benefit of these other arenas. And, it is a little strange for me. But, at the same time, it is also wonderful.  Ah, but I digress.  This will all be covered under one of the upcoming Best of Blog Challene 2009 topics, so stay tuned.

The biggest thing I got out of BarCamp was the knowledge and inspiration to take a big step forward and to launch a website based on one of my passions: helping others achieve their dreams, as I mentioned at the very end of my post for the first day of the Best of Blog Challenge.  BarCamp gave me the strength of mind to start The Dream Shepherd.  And, while it’s definitely a work in progress, it is my baby and I am hoping to make it a place for others to find inspiration and the tools necessary to excel and/or achieve their dreams.  After all, it’s better to start a trip than to plan it out forever.  As Lao-tzu said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.”  And, the knowledge gained at BarCamp gave me the courage to take that first step.  My journey has begun and I feel awesome!