Back To Normal

Sunday Ginny and I lay long abed talking and cuddling and listing to heavy rain drum on the roof.

After all our recent focus and thoughts about disaster training, it’s good to return to normal life—such as it is.

We drove up to a crowded Dave’s Diner for breakfast where I ordered pancakes and Ginny ordered sausage and gravy biscuits. Three waiters, Chris, Billy and Nicole, brought Ginny’s dish to our table laughing like fiends. Turns out the two fresh- baked biscuits rose to a peak in the oven—they looked like perky breasts!

The five of us laughed like crazy making risqué comments.

Well, maybe you’d have to have been there to see how funny that was.

Afterwards Ginny and I drove to the grocery store. My feet hurt so I sat on a bench outside while she shopped. As I waited, my thoughts turned to charity and how our giving to the poor has slacked off recently.

As she came out of the store, a young man approached Ginny. He’d been shopping too and his grocery bill cost more than he expected so he did not have bus fare to take his bags of groceries home. At first she passed him by, but she said, “I felt a check in my spirit” and she turned back to give him the bus fare he needed.

I’d watched the whole transaction as I walked to meet her and I just knew she was doing the right thing. We enjoyed a long talk about charity and the Spirit of God as we drove home.

Strange.

Back home, with an exciting football game on tv, and an exciting book open on my lap, I dozed for three hours in a more exciting nap.

Now, it turns out that our CERT training has not prepared us for every eventuality—sometimes, improvisation is the order of the day.

For instance:

That’s a scene from a video I watched last night; it’s called 30 Days Of Night.

The pack of vampires is attacking the sheriff in a town up on the Artic Circle where the sun disappears for a month. Without sunlight to thwart them, the vampires run amuck, burn out the town’s people, chew their throats, and drink their blood leaving only six survivors.

Well, what else can you expect to happen where there’s no CERT training and the governor of the state is off campaigning in the sunny lower 48?

In another area, Friday my daughter-in-law e-mailed me an Associated Press news story about Hurricane Ike in Texas. It carried this photo:

Yes, that’s a lion.

In a hurricane shelter.

Seems a zoo keeper tried to outrun the hurricane, but his truck got flooded out. He and a lion he was trying to save swam to the Baptist church on Bolivar Island, Texas.

People already in the church helped him get the lion inside; they shut it in a separate room to ride out the storm.

The full news story can be found at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080917/ap_on_re_us/ike_tales_of_survival .

Water in the church sanctuary deepened to four feet during the night.

People and lion survived. "They worked pretty well together, actually," said the lion's owner, Michael Ray Kujawa. "When you have to swim, the lion doesn't care about eating nobody."

So, vampire attacks and lions showing up in hurricane shelters—they did not cover such contingencies in our CERT training classes.

Or, if they did, I may have dozed off during that exciting class.