The Winter of My Discontent

An update for the record I feel bad that haven't written in a long time. I have thought about all kinds of things to write. I have had entire blogs going through my head and in the end I just keep them to myself. Some were really funny, you should have been there, it was great! So on to the business at hand here.

The fact is my life has been kind of hectic and also emotionally draining for the last two months or so. It pretty much started with the winter ice storm that shut the city of Joplin down quite effectively for about a week. This was the second week of December and Christmas was looming over Wal-Mart shoppers everywhere. But people weren't shopping for loved ones, they were draining all stores of candles, flashlights, and generators. A lot of people that I know were enjoying the adventure of "camping out" in their homes. As for me I was extremely annoyed. I didn't like being without the internet and electricity. I didn't enjoy the adventure of emptying my fridge that I had just stocked up with food. I didn't enjoy being out of work and having nothing to do but shuffle from place to place to move food and bathe etc. I was a grump about the whole thing to be quite honest. It tested my meddle and I failed in a lot of ways. I found that I was a wuss about my creature comforts. I didn't like being inconvenienced. It really could have been a lot worse and it was for a lot of people. I was lucky that my friend Lyn had gas heat, hot water and a gas stove. I stayed with him and we tried to have some fun with it I suppose. We burned tons of candles and played Trivial Pursuit. Unfortunately the Trivial Pursuit was some anniversary edition and the questions were actually quite...well trivial. I mean this is stuff I didn't know and felt no better to learn it. At least a lot of the old versions questions were points of interest that I didn't know. This was pop culture stupidity. We played for three hours before someone won and by then we didn't care. The thing is the sun was setting at like 4:30 pm and then you were in complete darkness save for candles. There was no music, no tv, nothing to do. How did the Waltons manage? I'm such a wuss. When the end comes I won't be much of a survivalist and this knowledge is a shocker to me.

There was also a lot of family tension that came out of the storm that I don't want to get into right now as this forum is inappropiate. Suffice it to say that my family is not really ready for any hard times either. The gray days and emotional burden really took a toll after the third day. There were a few distractions as I helped my boss from Spiva move all of her and her husbands stuff out of their house. Talk about timing! How would you like to move all of your stuff when you have no power and there is ice everywhere and your new home is not ready to move in. I felt for them. There was also the wonders of Lyn's tub. I read "This Present Darkness" during this affair (I know there is irony here, but I was reading it before the storm) in Lyn's huge tub with the hottest water I could stand. I actually ruined a feature on my phone from all the steam in the room. Lyn would read on the couch with a flashlight while I sat in the tub for hours with a little camp lantern. That was nice, but you can only read and soak so long.

There is also the beauty of the devastation that the storm wrought on our little burg. There was two inches of clear ice on every single item that was outside when it came. It looked like a big glass kingdom. Standing outside when the sun was shining provided an amazing menagerie of beauty and impending danger. You could hear every tree creaking and about every minute you could hear the crack of release as another branch broke or tree came asunder, followed by the falling crashing that sounded like all hell was breaking loose. The grass was crunchy and each individual blade was visibly coated. Talk about walking on eggshells. All day long you could hear the creaking, cracking, and crashing, the only other sound; sirens. As I drove around town it looked like Joplin had been under mortar fire. My neighborhood was a complete disaster. If you had a tree you had a problem. Another thing that added to the seeming spanking that we had gotten from Providence was all the blow up lawn ornaments for Christmas. There was deflated and sad Santas and Snowmen everywhere. Some were hanging dead and loose from cables meant to stabilize them.

I will say this about Joplin people. They put their heads down and trudged ahead. It was not a good time for businesses to be closed for a week, just before Christmas. Most people tried to smile and be friendly. Things were tough all over and everyone knew it.

Now then (I know this is really long, but I can't help it), through all of this my sister was extremely pregnant and miserable. She was going between my Dad's house and her house. She didn't feel comfortable in any other bed but her own, but she had only the heat of lighting her gas burners on her stove. She also had no hot water or lights and she had kids about to drive her insane as cabin fever set in. My mom took Lilly full time and I had Gabriel during the days trying to find things to do and keep him from driving me and himself insane. My Dad did not suffer any loss of any services except the internet. He made a lot of this and I had to tell him that most people were a lot more inconvenienced than he. Being the only one in the family with power made his home a constant turnstile of bathers and people watching t.v. I could tell he was getting weary of the constant invasion of his home. He never said anything and was most hospitable in spite of it all of course. I only spent one night there. I felt like Lyn had his fill of me being in his home as well.

Finally I got my power back after a week. I spent the day getting my food back and getting my house back in some order. The cat was overjoyed to have me back and did a dance in my honor. I then called my Mom to tell her the good news. She told me that she was still without power and that as a result of so many cold nights sleeping in front of her fireplace her and Lilly had both got a vicious cold. She asked if I would mind if she came over with Lilly and stay the night. Ok, honesty here. I did mind! I hadn't had a space to myself with power for a week and now I was going to have my Mom and my seven-year-old niece in my house? And they both were sick as dogs! For those of you who don't know me very well, I'm a little weird about avoiding sickness at all costs. I never drink after someone (my niece and nephew don't understand why Uncle Shaun won't share his bottled water). I don't shake hands in the winter if I can avoid it and if I do I make a mental note to not touch my face until I wash that hand. I wash my hands about every thirty minutes in the winter and I have a vitamin regimen meant to ward off all evil. Inviting sickness into my small home was not my idea of a good time to say the least. Now let me tell you how much of a selfish bastard I am. The house I live in is owned by my Mom. She has been very generous about rent being negligible to help me afford going to college (more on that later). So here I am feeling put out! I was not only a wuss, I was also finding out that I'm a prick. Of course I had them over and prayed for God to change my selfish shriveled heart. I gave Mom my bed and slept on the blow up mattress and put Lilly in my computer room on another blow up mattress. We watched a lot of movies that I wouldn't watch on my own. Movies about princesses and horses and all the girly stuff you can imagine. Lilly threw up all night the first night much to my horror. I was sanitizing every surface that she touched. Fortunately i had to help the movers during the day. Poor Mom was couped up in my house all day with a sick kid. I tried to make them both feel better by making food and letting them stay put as much as possible. I introduced Lilly to the joys of "Oliver!" (1960's musical about Oliver Twist) to save my sanity and was surprised that she actually followed the film for the whole 2 1/2 hours. Finally Mom got power after two nights and two days with me.

So that is all I'm going to write as this is going on forever. The thing I was trying to get across is that my idea of myself and who I am was tested by fire or ice if you will. I came out of it humbled and prayerful. I have a long way to go to be the man that I think I am or wish I was.