Extreme Home Makeover Application

Extreme Home Makeover Hard hats, soft hearts

Volunteers work overtime to build a new home for Anaiah Rucker and her family

Anaiah Rucker always thought she would be a veterinarian when she grew up. But Sunday, the 10-year-old Madison resident said she’s reconsidered that plan. “I want to be an orthopedic surgeon,” Anaiah told a group of reporters outside her home.

Other than a change in career path, Anaiah says she is the same little girl she was on the “dark and rainy” morning of Feb. 4, when she and her sister stepped in front of a moving pickup truck on North Main Street in a run for the school bus.  Anaiah pushed her sister, Camry, then 5,  out of the path of the truck and took the full brunt of the impact.

“I am loveable and laughable,” she said to visitors Sunday. The cherub-faced girl is also resilient beyond measure. She lost a leg in the accident, but Anaiah fast realized all she has gained as a result of her selfless sacrifice.  Sunday, the surprise payoff was huge.

Anaiah came out of her temporary home on Candler Lane a few hours after Ty Pennington, star of ABC TV’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” gave a shout-out to the Rucker family at about 10:30 a.m.  “Good Morning, Rucker Family!” was the holler that’s become a signature part of the show that spearheads the construction of a new home for families impacted by tragic events or illness. The “Extreme Makeover” bus parked in the cul-de-sac in front of Anaiah’s home as Pennington and countless members of the ABC production crew milled inside and outside the home all day. Anaiah described Pennington as “a cool cat, just like me.”

The event impacted the entire town of Madison. While most residents were in church, a police motorcade escorted the bus and its entourage through downtown, reporters and photographers amassed nearby for hours, volunteer coordinators set up tents in a parking lot along the I-20 corridor, and a “Brave Heart” march involving hundreds of people took over Commerce Street in the early evening. Anaiah’s actions that chilly morning shielded her sister, Camry Harden, from serious injury but resulted in Anaiah losing a leg. Anaiah recovered at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite and came home to Madison in late March, six weeks after she underwent surgery to save her crushed right leg, amputate her left leg above the knee and remove a damaged kidney. At the time of her homecoming, she said it “was the happiest day of my life.” Sunday, after learning her family will receive a free new house being built especially to make life easier for her, Anaiah said, “I feel so proud and I feel so happy.” Asked if there were anything special she would like to see in her new home, Anaiah said, “It doesn’t matter what’s in it as long as my family is there.

Could COLOR give your doc's waiting room an extreme medical home ...

On Thursday, idea engine Bill Nguyen launched the new social app COLOR for iPhone (and Android soon).  COLOR “lets people in close proximity (within 100 feet) capture and share their photos, videos and text simultaneously to multiple phones in real time.”  Synergizing mobile, social, micro-geo-location, and the holy trinity of e-currency—image, video and text—COLOR is poised to join Facebook and Twitter to complete the Axis of SoMe (social media).

There’s some concern that this app will “promote voyeurism” and again we will have many conversations about privacy in The Age of Social. (And then, again, in The Age of Exponentially Social With a Game Layer on Top.) When you start to satisfy your curiosity by finding out more about COLOR, if you don’t know already, you’ll come across CNN’s Tech post “New Color app promotes mobile voyeurism.”

And, at the same time, there is a LOT of love for COLOR

I get it. All of it. This is social-in-real-time and close-proximity, close up connection .To anyone within a 100 feet you are connected to. Real-time collective documenting image and video. Collective commentary and witnessing. Shared instantaneously and exponentially. (Think Facebook and Twitter are right now transforming the geo-political landscape? Wait until our human history unfolds in COLOR.)