So in honor of our two new kittens, Basil Ringnose & Eustace The Black Monk, I'm donating cat food.

And chocolate. Because chocolate always makes you feel better.

We've got some in Asheville too, but so far they're just trickling in family by family. I heard a possibly apocryphal story this morning that Fema had airlifted a bunch of hospital patients who were supposed to go to MUSC in Charleston SC. They ended up in Charleston WV. This does not surprise me somehow.

apocryphal cnn

Take good care of 'em, Graves. If you are close to where they are, you may want to check to see if you can donate specific goods or time or both. I know locally we had a big call early on for new underwear and towels and toiletries. I suppose for some of these people they went several days without a decent shower, and it sure is nice to get the grime off after roughin' it.

OK, watching the quasi-debacle of DC sending busses down south and being all pissy cause they couldn't find any refugees/evacuees/Americans/whatever, and then wildly promising to find them 'somewhere' on the way home (which they sort of did, I guess), I'm getting a real sense of 'trendiness' in having your very own passle of the downtrodden to point to. I mean, if anything has to be trendy, I'm glad this is it, but still, it's kind of odd. It's sort of like that Christmas with the talking Elmo, except Elmo is starving and broke. Anything that'll make yuppies be philanthropic, I guess. Even if it's semi-competitive philanthropy...

Gravy lives in Raleigh?

Technically I live in Garner-- town of 20,000 on Raleigh's Southern rim.

But trendiness? Oh by gosh, yes! In fact, this morning we had a story about a family of 4 (of the 400 evacuees here) that was adopted. The (white, middle-class) couple took the evacuees on a shopping spree and wanted to have them (interracial couple with 2 boys) come live in their home. But the Evacuees were leery because they weren't sure if they would get all their government paperwork done in order to get asny benefits they maight recieve.

Needless to say there are many, many poor people who live in Raleigh already. No word yet on wehter they will receive shopping trips to Target.