Wednesday Evening....

Absolutely gorgeous blue-sky, warm, clear, breezy day today. The few trees that lost their leaves in the December/January cold snaps are budding all over, the mockingbirds are singing their hearts out, and the sun is warming up as if summer is half a heart-beat away.

While I was out doing errands today, I had Manilow music on the CD player and I opened up the back window a little bit and let Barry's music float (blast!) into the sky. It was the type of day that just makes you want to "share the Manilow" with the rest of the world.

Here in Clear Lake, all was calm and peaceful, bright and sunny. Over in Texas City, everything was dark and stormy, frightening and firey. One of the biggest energy plants had a huge explosion early this afternoon, around 1:30. I'm surprised we didn't hear the blast here, being that the explosion was heard out in Galveston.

I heard about the explosion when I turned on the TV at 4:00 to see what was on Oprah, but all programming was pre-empted by the news media covering the blast at the power plant. They haven't given a definite number yet of people killed, and some workers are still unaccounted for. Victims are being taken by helicopter to the larger, better-equipped downtown Houston hospitals. The Galveston and Clear Lake hospitals can't handle the worst of the injuries, so I guess those hospitals don't have "burn units." Being that they're in such close proximity to the Texas City power plants, you would think they would be equipped.

They showed the helicopters landing at the hospitals...... blue sky, bright sun, swaying palm trees.... too beautiful a day for such horror. Not that it would be less horrible if the day had been rainy and cloudy.

And I didn't realize that Texas City's schools are so close to the power plants. What on earth were they thinking? Why couldn't the power plants be off in a little town all by themselves? When the blast happened, Texas City parents went to the schools to check on their children. The schools were under a "lock-down" until school officials made sure it was safe to open the doors, so the parents couldn't get into the schools. One distraught father broke a window just trying to get into the elementary school to make sure his son was okay. What a nightmare-day this has been for Texas City.

Today's Chronicle had more stories about the Minnesota boy who shot and killed his grandfather and then took the guns to school to continue the shooting. That boy's father committed suicide, his mother was in jail, his grandfather had a young girlfriend, and the boy studied Hitler the way most boys his age study baseball statistics. Hello??? Why wasn't anyone paying attention to that poor child?!

You just never know what will happen, from one day to the next. As my friend Frankie always told me, "No one is guaranteed tomorrow."

Not even on a beautiful, clear, sunshine-filled, bird-singing day such as today.