Ran with the devil, Walked with angels: A warm spot.

1/18/07 Thursday
This is the warm spot between storms. Warm as in it may reach 43 degrees. Come midnight they are predicting a big storm coming in. A powerful low pressure system that already dumped snow and ice on parts of California that has seldom seen such a thing. In fact it is for many the first time they have ever seen snow. That system is to meet a massive surge of cold air coming out of the artic. They are talking a foot or two of snow. We’ll be fine as long as the power doesn’t go out. Nate is sending us a propane heater that I am sure he picked up for a song cause he’s good at that. It is a shame we can’t put propane in our two hundred gallon tank because the pipes leak but I’m sure we can go get a bottle of propane to attach to it. That will provide heat if the power goes out.

When the roads clear up Amy, a wonderful woman who found us through the homesteader forum online, is bringing us a wood burning stove. Fortunately we already have an insulated hole in the wall from where my grandfather Rudy ran the chimney when he had a wood burning stove. It would be nice to have a chain saw to cut wood with. Fact is there is enough dead wood on the trees around the house to provide a cord of wood. I plan on cutting it out anyway just for safety and the health of the trees. I bought a cheap bow saw with the idea of doing it by hand but the Walmart piece of junk wouldn’t cut straight making it impossible to use. I had Cherie take it back cause we needed the twelve bucks it cost anyway. It’s allot of work for me to cut by hand but I need the exercise. These muscles have never been gotten back in shape since the coma. I had just started the physical therapy when I was extradited from St. Louis.

What to do with this day? We spent about the last we had at the grocery store last night. We had gone to the Baptist church for the dinner they have on Wednesday night only to find it was canceled. That was a bummer cause right now a meal for a buck goes a long way. We bought some Jeno’s pizza they had on sale for fifty nine cents each at the IGA in Stanton figuring that would be good. They were like eating air. Instead of eating one apiece we ate all four of the little things. After Cherie fixed peanut butter sandwiches that actually gave us some protein and satisfied the hunger. She will run into town to see if she can find milk and perhaps bread. The IGA was out yesterday as the town is stoking up for the storm.

Gee, I started that last paragraph with the idea of working out what I will do today. Got sidetracked as I am prone to do so what am I going to do today? I will take the carpet Carman peed on outside to wash. The faucet is frozen out there but should thaw as it will get above freezing. Then I’ll bring it in to dry but to hasten that I will use the wet and dry vac to suck as much water out as possible. When it’s dry I can seam it with another scrap of carpet left over from the back room. Actually two more scraps. They will almost fill the hallway. With that done I can nail down the threshold I made from a scrap piece of baseboard I planed flat on the planer I was lucky enough to get in Toledo. Perhaps I will also begin to work on building the sewing table for Cherie. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll use some of the parts of the cherry dining room table Minnie Lee had. It was pretty much trashed by either Virginia’s brothers or Larry. Don’t know who but it was broken badly and drug across the concrete on it’s top. I’ve dismantled it for the wood. I’ll get pictures. Wait and see what I can do. That and the base for the oven are planned in my head, more or less. Have to draw out the plans cause that’s pretty much required for me with this brain injury. Otherwise I’ll get lost.

So that’s the plan. Let’s see what actually happens.

1:30 – So I’ve been out in the garage freezing my fingers off. Started to clear off the work bench but as I sought places to put things decided to do some work on the hastily put up old cabinets. Cherie just called me in to get something to eat. I am putting a back on one of the cabinets that Rudy or someone had hobbled together decades ago. Then I’ll put up the piece of pegboard I found in the old henhouse. It ain’t big but it’ll help. Used the piece of paneling I had drilled some holes in to hang pegboard hooks for the back. Time to get back out there. Cherie is getting ready to head into town.

Cherie got our taxes E-filed. It took her two days of fighting getting bumped off line and finding an E-filing site that didn’t try to crank her a fee. When the checks come in we are going to rush back to Ohio and pick up the rest of our stuff.

It’s 7:00 now. I had a slow down at around 4:00. Kept working out in the garage despite that. Just worked more carefully. I made backs for the two cabinets that I figured out went on top of each other. Didn’t see that when I put them up in the garage when we first got here. I am tired as I always am after a slow down. Was running at an 8 on the bob scale for a good part of the day. Right now I am just a hair below normal at a 6.

One of the things I wanted to mention was the series on the brain that CBS news is running. Yesterday they featured a lady named Sarah who had received a massive brain injury. She was in a coma for twenty years and came out of it. Actually it wasn’t a coma as such but they had another term for it that I can’t remember right now. They showed a scan of her brain that showed black spots indicating the massive dead portions of her brain. Her brain had been rewiring itself over the twenty years she wasn’t able to communicate.

This is the car I had the wreck in. I was flung out the back window as it rolled end over end. Was declared dead at the scene but brought back in the hospital.

What struck Cherie was the black spots. When I had my grand mal seizure that landed me in the hospital for three days they took a series of MRI’s of my brain. It too has lots of black spots. Wasn’t nearly as bad as Sarah’s but scary none the less. In my case there were many spots of different sizes. There was a big area on right frontal lobe. Cherie looked at me and said “You are so lucky to be alive”. There is no question about that. As I watched the speech therapist work with Sarah it brought back memories of how they worked with me at the Oklahoma University Medical Center I woke up at. They taught me how to talk again and also how to walk. For that they had to teach another part of my brain to operate my right side. That is because the part that used to was dead. Not only am I lucky to be alive I am lucky to be able to function at all. When I have my slow downs (petite or partial seizures) you can see me limping more as my control of the right side is diminished.

Yeah I’m lucky. I’m also blessed but I don’t know why. What is in store? Again it seems like there is an unseen hand orchestrating our lives. Enough for tonight. I am tired and will call it a night. Who knows what tomorrow will bring as this storm rolls in.