The Day Reba McEntire Used My Bathroom

I initially posted this on October 28th, the day after Reba was filmed on location on the DigitalRich Ranch shooting the new Brooks & Dunn music video for Cowgirl's Don't Cry, but I think Google Alerts popped up in her manager's inbox and some feelings were hurt.

I was asked to take this down for a few weeks. I've noticed some news stories since the CMA Awards about Reba performing with Brooks & Dunn and some YouTube behind-the-scenes stuff about the shoot, so I figure it's safe to repost.




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Today was the day. It all started about a week ago when an unassuming young gent named John knocked on our front door. He asked my wife if he could come in and take a few pictures of our house. He'd heard we had a nice and spacious living area and they wanted to see if it would work for a new Brooks & Dunn (w/special guest Reba McEntire) music video.

Michelle came downstairs to my office to get me, and I did the proper vetting. I asked for his business card, what production company he was with, etc, etc. We let him in and he took a few pictures and left. I wasn't sure we'd hear from him again, but he emailed me a few days later.

He told us he wanted to stop by the house with the director to look around and we said ok. About 10 people showed up and walked around the kitchen area talking about possible shots. They ended up wanting to shoot the scene here and John contacted me the next day with their offer. I countered with double what they offered, and we settled for 1/2 way between the two numbers.

The advance crew showed up today about 10:00AM and got to work. The most important thing to get done first seemed to be set-up for catering. The tables went up, along with about 35 chairs or so. Unfortunately they picked the coldest day so far this season and eating outside was just a bit frosty.

While the catering guys were hard at work, the rest of the crew started arriving and used part of our land as a make-shift parking lot.




They started to set-up the production trucks, generators, outside lighting (shining into the kitchen), and other necessary work to get the right look inside.





Then it was lunch time. Catering provided a rather tasty rice-stuffed chicken breast, salad with all the trimmings, wild rice, and broccoli and for dessert a rather tasty Boston cream pie.


Here we see the piano room, after everything that was not needed in the great room was moved into it to make room for the interior lighting and camera. I wasn't aware they were going to do all this. It was a bit of a shock, but they were very careful.


Here you can see one of the lighting set-ups and the camera in the edge of the great room looking into the kitchen and dinette area. Reba arrived about this time and they used our master bathroom to do her make-up and touch up her hair. This was unforseen, and of course was the one room my wife DIDN'T clean up before the shoot.


And here is the second interior lighting set in the dining room looking through the foyer into the dinette. The young girl there is an actress that played Reba's character's daughter.



And, finally, the money shot. Here is Reba's character answering the phone, ostensibly getting horrible news, and her daughter seeing her mom distressed comes over to hug her.


And we're done. The crew left by 3:30PM after packing up everything and using digital pictures they took prior to the shoot to make sure everything was put back in its place. We did a walk through with a couple staff guys to make sure all was ok. We told them it was, they left, and then my wife realized they took our fruit bowl (making its screen debut in the photo above).

I called John on his cell and they rushed it right back over.

It was a very interesting experience, but if there is a next time, I'm not coming down off my number.

Watch the video here: "Cowgirl's Don't Cry" by Brooks & Dunn

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Old Hardware & Software

A quick organizational burst brought out a few cluttered boxes of stuff from one of our storage closets. In it were obsolete software titles (3D Landscaper, Microsoft MapIt, some graphic design stuff, old games) as well as old hardware (a couple wireless routers from 1995, a modem or two, and a few things I cant exactly recall what they are).

These are like old friends to me. They have absolutely no use to me, and its not like they would mean much to the folks down at the Salvation Army or Goodwill.

I can barely bring myself to throw them out. So I don’t. I just packed them back away but neater this time.

Math On Moving Day

Saturday the dreaded day arrived. I had to help my sister-in-law move from her apartment in Franklin TN to her new home in Spring Hill TN. I dread moving days for three reasons:

1. No matter how well anyone prepares, if there is not a professional packing and moving service involved, there will be countless items still not packed that result in endless additional trips to and from the moving truck.
2. Murphy’s Moving Law #1- anytime you help someone move, at least one of the locations is NOT on the ground floor.
3. Murphy's Moving Law #2- People you thought would show up to help, don’t.

This move looked to be a bad one at the outset. Jackie’s apartment is on the second floor, and the stairway up was designed by a person that has never had to move out of, or into, an apartment.

7 steps up, U-turn on a tight landing with tons of wood guard rails and posts, another 7 steps up to a narrow walkway, hard turn left with posts all around to the ceiling, 6 paces, then another hard turn left with more posts, 6 more paces, hard turn right into the apartment whose door battles with the closet door right behind for the right to stay open.

As I walked up the stairs the first time, surveying the work ahead, and the boxes and storage bins to be moved, I quickly did the math. About 150 or so items to move, many heavy with books and over-stuffed miscellaneous items. About 100 trips up and down the stairway maze. 2,800 steps total, 1,400 up and 1,400 down. Oh- forgot- another 6 steps down to the street level on a gently slopping wide concrete stairway to where the truck was, throwing in another 1,200 steps, making a total of 4,000.

For your information:

• US National Monument- 897 steps
• Statue of Liberty- 354 steps
• St. Louis Arch- 1,076 steps
• Eiffel Tower- 1,665 steps
• Empire State Building- 1,860 steps

So, this move, just counting the steps up, would be like climbing the Eiffel Tower, except of course for carrying an extra 50-75 pounds in your arms to the top. Wonderful.

I told Jackie as I thought through the grueling hours to come, that laziness is the true mother of invention, and I wanted a minute to think through how to cut some of the work out. Then it came to me- she could drop each box and storage bin down to me from outside her door, about 14 feet up including the guard rail. She thought I was an idiot, but agreed to try it, since she would be doing the dropping, and me the catching.

It worked brilliantly, except for the heavy ones that I dropped, took in the gut (resulting in some light bruising), or jammed fingers with slightly greater bruising. No blood though. That didn’t come until we moved her stuff into her new house and I ripped open a finger with some pliers.

It was all worth it. We were able to drop almost everything from the second floor (including the mattress and box-spring), except for the couch, tables, and a few boxes that were too heavy for Jackie to drop over the edge to me. Fortunately.

We were able to cut the job down to roughly the Statue Of Liberty in terms of steps to climb. Cool.

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How To Own Two Houses And Still Be Homeless

My sister-in-law just closed on her first new house last week. She is thrilled to be a home-owner for the first time, and looking forward to leaving the apartment she has been renting for the last few years.

Just the mention of someone closing on a new house gives me chills for two reasons. The first, especially if its someone I know, is because a house closing will almost certainly result in a moving day. See my post from Thanksgiving about the top 10 things I am thankful for in 2006. Number 5 will be blown to smithereens about this time tomorrow. The second reason? Read on…

When Michelle and I closed on the house we live in now, we were so amazed and thankful. We had been on a three year journey to find the right home, having outgrown our current place and its 3 bedrooms. With the birth of R, there were six of us, and we were getting cramped. We didn’t know if we wanted to build a new home, or buy an existing one. I didn’t care, as long as we had at least 10 acres. I had no time to think mowing the 1/3 acre yard we had. Our realtor faithfully drove us around every weekend for months on end to all parts of Williamson County looking for the right house or plot of land. It finally happened in March of 2003. We found the perfect place.

We closed on the new house on Friday May 9th, 2003, and we were so excited we could barely sleep. Part of the insomnia for me was the fact that we had not sold our current home, and so several double-mortgage months lay ahead.

On Saturday May 10th, Michelle and I had watched the news about an approaching storm system that promised to deliver extreme wind and rain, and knew a night of scared little girls lay ahead. We finally got to sleep after midnight and several loud thunder claps that resulted in multiple visits by our girls asking to sleep with us.

A few hours later, about 3AM on Mothers day 2003, the phone rang. It was my friend Jeff, and he was yelling something at me. After a second or two I became somewhat lucid, and I heard him say that there was a tornado coming straight at our house. I thanked him, hung up, and woke up Michelle. We grabbed the girls, who promptly started crying, and headed downstairs to our “tornado room”, which really was nothing more than a small coat closet with a cinderblock wall on one side, and the stairway above. Somehow naming it our “tornado room” made it feel safer than if we were only hiding in a "coat closet." As we headed downstairs the house started getting pelted by large hail. Not a good sign.

After a few minutes, the wind picked up to a deafening roar, and then just as quickly subsided. We were safe, and I ventured out to make sure all was well. We lost a few roof tiles, and there was light debris in our yard, but nothing remarkable. We all sat together in our living room as I turned on the news.

The always faithful and perky Lisa Patton from Channel 2 News was hard at work keeping everyone up to speed on the twister outbreak. She got right to business, and we interpreted the following from her report:

The Good News
Our house was spared, and the tornado bearing down on us had passed.

The Bad News
The F1 tornado that skipped over our house went on to cause severe damage at several neighborhoods down the road.

The Really, Really Bad News
A new F3 tornado had been spotted in Leipers Fork, touching down several times and destroying some homes and other buildings.

Coincidentally, our brand new house we just closed on happened to be in Leipers Fork, and on the very road the tornado struck. We all went back to bed, but obviously didn’t sleep well. I dreamt of paying two mortgages and being homeless at the same time.

The next morning we skipped church and headed out to check on our new home. When we got to our road, it was blockaded by the police. We told the officer our house was on this road, he asked for our address. He checked a clipboard, and said that our house was in the damage zone, but he didn’t know any more information, couldn’t help us, and couldn’t let us pass through. Have a nice day.

I turned around and took a back road to get at our house from another direction. There were downed trees everywhere, but we were able to pop out further down on our road, just 2500 feet or so from the house. We drove towards our house, dodging tree branches and other various pieces of debris lying in the road, and made it to our driveway. There sat our house, undamaged, and looking as nice as the day we bought it.






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Rain In The Middle Of The Night

It has been raining constantly since yesterday afternoon- about 15 hours now, at varying rates. An hour of light rain and then 20 minutes of torrential downfall. Rinse and Repeat. Even now, when it rains in the middle of the night, I wake up suddenly with fear and concern before remembering that all is alright and fall back to sleep. Allow me to explain.

We moved in to our new home in the spring of 2003, and prior to that created a “punch-list” of the things that needed fixing by the builder before work was complete. There were the standard things like patches of drywall that needed to be smoothed and painted, the odd closet door that didn’t close right, and many other small fixes. For the most part, the builder and his team did a good job getting these things done in a timely manner (measured in “home builder time” - one human year equals 1 day for a builder). Except for one HUGE problem.

Our back patio, with a 4 foot retaining wall on three sides, floods every time it rains. The patio was designed to have a slight slope towards the back and 3 drains were installed into the brick retaining wall that allows the water that falls from the deck above, and from the 3 gutters running from the roof, to gently drain out into the yard. Interesting plan…but it didn’t work.

The first storm we had after moving in- more than a month later- turned our patio into a lake. The drains didn’t do a darn thing. The water just rose and rose, and finally when it reached the door jam of the 3 doors that open to the patio I took action. It was in the afternoon, and I rushed to Home Depot. I bought a sump pump, plugged it in, hooked up the drain hose and plopped it right in the middle of our patio. Within an hour the lake had become a pond, and the wood floors on the basement level were saved. Thus began a 2 ½ year epoch that we called "the great flood years".

I soon graduated to two pumps, and then upgraded both pumps to the ones that automatically turn on and off. On many occasions storms arrived in the middle of the night, and I awoke with a start, threw on shorts and grabbed rain boots and umbrella, and stood in the pouring rain setting up the pumps, plugging them in, and muttering a half-awake prayer to God to keep me from getting electrocuted or badly shocked. If I fell down unconscious I would surely drown on the flooded patio. If I did, Michelle would be really bummed when she got up in the morning. The wood floors would probably be ruined.

All this time we are arguing with the builder (I will call him Mr. B from now on) to get this fixed. His solution was to dig two trenches through our backyard out to our creek (about 100 feet away), connect them to two of the drains on the backside of the retaining wall, and allow gravity to drain the water out to the creek. Great idea. He just never got around to doing it. I would call him and leave a voice mail (I stopped trying to E-mail him since his AOL account reported back that his inbox was over capacity…for two years!), and he would call me right back (about 2 weeks later…in builder's time that is 8 hours later) when I wasn’t home. On occasion when we did talk, he said he couldn’t get the work done because it recently rained and the equipment would damage the yard, or the crew he used was busy on a job on the other side of the county, or whatever. This went on for years. By the summer of 2005 I gave up. I stopped calling him, and he stopped calling me.

Leverage is a BEAUTIFUL Thing

The story is not over. There are two very important things to understand before I conclude. When we moved in to our home Mr. B left his Yamaha 9’ Grand Player Piano (worth about $40k) in one of our first floor rooms that came to be known as the Piano room. Mr. B wanted to store it here because it added a nice touch when prospective home buyers were ushered in by their real-estate agents. At closing, he asked us if it would be ok to keep the piano in our house for six months or so until he finished building his own new house. We said ok, and promptly put our two oldest girls into piano lessons and enjoyed the collection of player discs they left. It was great. The six months turned into a year…and then two. We didn’t ask Mr. B about it, we just kept praying that a miracle would happen and he and his wife would suddenly forget they ever owned a piano.

On a cold winter Saturday morning in 2005, the fateful call came. It was Mr. B calling at 9AM to inform me that he had a moving truck on the way to our house to pick up the piano- he needed it that night for a Christmas party they were having at their house. His wife is, shall we say, a very determined person, and really had Mr. B’s tighty-whitey’s in a wad about waiting so long to get the piano back. I listened to Mr. B's sad story while a broad grin formed on my face. I used the ancient mystical power of leverage. Mr. B’s $40k piano, a successful Christmas party and his marriage were hanging in the balance.

I casually, and with a kind and gentle voice, told Mr. B that I wasn’t letting anyone in my house to take the piano until my drainage problem was fixed. Mr. B was silent for a good 10 seconds (a surprisingly quick reply in "builder’s time"). He assured me he would take care of it right away- would try to have his crew out sometime before Christmas- if it didn’t rain- and get it fixed. I agreed that was a good plan and told him he could get the piano back right after that. Again silence. We went back and forth for a few minutes- him throwing out solutions, me laying out the only way it would go down.

By 11:00AM there were 6 workers in my backyard, a backhoe, 2 trucks, and a crew of grass seeders that couldn’t speak English. All the while the piano movers were sitting in their truck at the front of the house.

By 2:00PM the trenches were dug, drain pipe laid, trenches re-filled, and grass seed and hay laid down. The crew left, and Mr. B arrived in his obligitory builder's Ford F-150. He walked me through the work area, proudly showed off how it would work, and then said he would go out front to let the movers know they could get the piano. “Not yet” I said. We went through a series of tests- flooding the patio with water from the hose twice to make sure the drains took care of the problem. It worked great, but I was concerned that leaves and debris would clutter the drain openings and asked him to install wire grid traps. He left for Home Depot, returned and personally cut and installed the filters. By 3:30PM all the work was done, his movers came in and got the piano loaded by 4PM, and rushed it to Mr. B's place in time for his 6PM Christmas party.

No kidding- that night it rained like crazy. Out of habit I came downstairs at 1AM to check the patio and was thrilled to see all was ok. I went right back to sleep.