Just when you think nothing else can happen

Well, it has just been a little too interesting the last few days.  Do you mind if I break down and complain just a little?

I mean, we are incredibly lucky.  No trees fell on our house, our pipes did not freeze, there was not any problem cooking food really, just no baking possible.  Granted, the computer and other electronic entertainment devices did not function, and the candles put out enough combustion products to give me a mild headache every night.  And my parents have been living with us, God bless them.  I’m perfectly happy to have them here, I love them both, they NEED a place to stay.  But I get so sick and tired of their continual bickering and squabbling.  I mean, come on.  They are WAY over 75.  It makes me want to slap them and tell them that at their ages they ought to know how to get along.  For pete’s sake.

My massage room was freezing cold, so I lost about $400 in business because I could not do massage in there.  No one would have been able to relax.   But on the other hand, we weren’t running up the electric bill at all.  There was no laundry to do.  It worked out.

I got an order in from Frontier Natural Foods cooperative today right at the end of my massage day.  Oh yes, I’m back to work.  A couple of people have had a bad fall, and some other folks have been lifting big pans of water onto their stoves so they can wash and eat and drink.  Then after I was done with that I prepared dinner for my folks and me.  J was at work at the liquor store.

Anyay, the shipment contained, among numerous other things, some coffee that I ordered for my friends who live out by the river.  I know how addicted to coffee they are.  I also know that their power is out, so I figured they had definitely been reduced to making stale canned coffee by hand because their  coffee grinder doesn’t work without electricity.  So before I took their French Roast beans out there, I opened the bag and ran about a half pound through my grinder.  Then I proceeded to ferry it out there to them.

And I’ll be damned if my charmed life hasn’t met a snag at last.  I hit a damned deer on the way out there.  And I couldn’t even find it in the dark to see if there was venison to harvest.

Those of you who read my blog will be aware that I have at times been blessed with the ability to sense deer ahead of me.  So it was a great shock for me when I actually missed the signs.  Actually, I did think I needed to watch out for deer on my departure from home.  But I was distracted by all the destruction I was seeing as I drove out to J.s place. 

I mean, there were places where the road crews had been along and moved whole trees off the road, their carcasses were strewn along the road.  In spots, the top of a tree would be right up to the edge of the pavement.  Every once in a while you could see a power pole that had snapped off, and the wires were down on the ground out in the field next to the road.  There were lots of houses where, when you drove by all you could see was a kerosene lantern in their living room, or some candles.  I started wondering what all the dairy farmers were doing about milking their cattle. 

Anyway, I forgot about the deer until he leaped out of the woods to my left just as I topped a little rise.  I had about ten feet to brake and start steering towards the left as he was flying through the air on his second bounding bounce, and then there was the inevitable “THUMP” as he connected with the front of my car.   I visualized him smacking right through my windshield and landing in my lap, but instead I saw him actually somersaulting in a leggy forward flip into the ditch to my right.  He landed and leaped over the fence and disappeared in the dark patch of oaks there.   I think I just caught the foreleg or knee as he was flying through the air when he leaped in front of me. 

I brought the car to a nearly screeching halt, pulled into a driveway, and swore a mighty oath.  Then I prepared to  jump out of my vehicle to see what kind of damage I had suffered.  I swore a second mighty oath in the same vein as the first, only with a certain amount of forehead slapping thrown in, since all available flashlights were at home, having been thoroughly utilized during the recent inconveniences.  The one that is usually in my purse was on my bedside table.   So, after kicking myself around a bit, I exited my vehicle to see what I could see in the light from my headlights.  Miraculously, they were completely unbroken.

For a while I could not see that there was any damage to my vehicle at all.  There was a large tuft of deer hair caught in the nose of the hood and not much else that I could see wrong.  So I proceeded the remaining mile of my 25 mile journey.  When I signalled my right hand turn into the gravel road that winds along to their driveway, I finally noticed that there was damage to my car.   My right front blinker light would go on, but not blink, and back right turn signal was blinking twice as fast as usual.  Alackaday. 

I pulled into J’s house, which of course, was virtually dark.  This did not mean there wasn’t anybody home.  I am at liberty to report that there was a party going on inside; the four people camped out in there were exceedingly merry.  The place was fine and warm, they had dined on a splendid homemade Mexican feast.   I taunted them with the fact that we had been able to perform that same feat yesterday only OUR black beans were homegrown from the garden this summer.

They greeted the arrival of the coffee quite enthusiastically and congratulated my on my foresight in having ground some  of it for them.  I borrowed a flashlight and went out to inspect my vehicle.   Seems like there is a spot about two feet wide and about two inches deep on the very front edge of the hood that has been crushed inwards.  There is no crumpling of fenders, the bumper doesn’t even appear to have been dented.  My air bag didn’t even go off (thank goodness!).

But still.  We have enough work to do.  We don’t really need to expend energy getting the hood of the car open.  It needs an oil change already, and they won’t be able to do it if the hood will not open.  And no doubt money is going to be involved in getting this hood thing fixed.   

 There is going to be money spent on an arborist to get the elms trimmed so they can heal from all the breakage.  We are going to have to pick up all the wood on the ground, or it’s going to be really hard to mow the lawns this summer. 

At least it warmed up to 38 degrees today and a lot of the ice melted out of the trees and off the power lines.  This means when it snows on Saturday, IF it snows on Saturday, and the weather guessers are pretty darn sure it is going to snow that day, at least it will be landing on bare-ish branches rather than on big chunks of ice.  So maybe we won’t get even more damage.

I’ll tell you, I don’t envy the electrical and telephone utility workers right now.  It has been totally miserable weather here, and through it all they have been out there picking wire up off the ground, replacing transformers that have arced out, replacing poles that snapped off, chain sawing trees out of the rights-of-way so they can get their trucks in there, getting stuck in the mud they discovered while driving across the field where the pole needed replacing, which was hiding under the rime of ice on the surface and grass, trimming broken branches off the wires, etc, etc, etc, day and night.  When it was 8 degrees. That’s MINUS 18 for you centigraders.  Not fun.  

So a big hearty thank you from the bottom of my heart to them for getting my power back on in only 5 days. 

And no more stuff for a while.  We need a breath here.