...this week has been a whirlwind.....
Sunday morning/afternoon was absolutely beautiful despite the tendency to be a little windy. Matthew and I headed to our church, we went to the 1130 service, dropped off the transcribing machine that I had been using afterward, and then we walked out into the blinding but gorgeous sunlight. We had packed up the two laptops, I grabbed my current read The Wizard of OZ book one and we drove the some odd miles down to Panera to grab some lunch, surf the web and get engulfed in a good book. Halfway through our time there the lights flashed. The internet stopped working. We didn't think anything of it and decided to pack up and go back to our home. We got back to our house and found that the garage door wouldn't go up....our electricity was shut off. By that time the wind was really picking up. The sky started to change to a dull gray and we just thought a storm was brewing and would soon let loose. Fat chance. The sky had much more on it's mind that just a simple rain storm.
I decided to go sit out on the front porch in my bucket seat. I thought I'd read a couple more chapters about the great adventure through OZ and listen to the wind blowing through the huge maples that line our street. Let me just tell you that it's NOT one of the smartest ideas I've ever come up with.
As I was sitting there I soon realized that the wind was picking up way too much. I had never seen it blow like this before....but I stayed outside. I had just finished the day before the book Prince Caspian, book number 2 in the Chronicles of Narnia Series by C.S. Lewis. In the book Narnia has magical trees and those trees come to life. Since this was fresh in my mind I started talking to the trees in a muffled voice "Mappie (since our tree's a maple), you've got to stay strong for me. You're too close to the house and if you fall over, you'lll crush our new home and you'll mess up the front lawn. Mappie stay strong". About 10 minutes later I heard a huge CRAAACK! I had no idea what large branch was cracking but I wanted to get out of the way!!!! I'm sure it was a funny site to see me scrambling trying to get out of the fold up bucket seat. It actually brought me to tears because I was so scared. Thanks be to God that it was the limb out by the road. The limb cracked right in half, was still connected and twisted backwards to land in our front yard.
We didn't know quite what to do during the rest of the storm. I was so shook up that I decided to go upstairs and organize all of our bills in a filing cabinet. I had been putting it off for quite some time. After the storm was over we walked out to our backyard and our HUGE walnut tree had decided to drop all of it's walnuts. We started that very night to pick them all up. You couldn't take a step without your footing being uneven. I'm surprised we didn't break our necks or twist our ankles. Matthew started griping but all I could say was "Hey they are all down now. Now we won't be picking up these smelly green things every weekend for the next two months"
For the next four days we were without electric. We stayed with my parents two night as I had to get up early the next morning to go to work and needed to use the hairdryer. I've learned a couple things through this storm. DON'T take the electricity for granted, we are blessed to have what we have. DON'T decide to stay outside to "hear" the wind when it's raging at 75 mph, really NOT smart. DON'T look up!
