It was Pavlov’s work in classical psychological conditioning that gave us the truth that the removal of a stimulus is a stimulus itself.

That would explain why at 3am this morning when the humidifier in our room suddenly became quiet my hub and I woke up. We awakened to hear the sound of sleet/freezing rain and, oh yes, the breaking of trees under the weight of ice.

I was instantly transported back to my girlhood in Georgia where ice storms are (as we saw last week) nothing to be messed with. I can remember lying in my bed hearing the tall, soft white pines snapping like toothpicks, hoping one wouldn’t land on our house, as it did many of our neighbor’s homes and cars.

While pine trees are no match for ½ inch coating of ice, turns out neither are fir trees and our poor weeping willow. She’s beyond repair from what I can see from the house.

The electric lines at our farm and my MIL’s farm are completely detached from the house lying in the yard.

 This repair may take a while.  Power crews have been dispatched all over our region, but us rural folks are the last to get online, rightly so.  The thought of days without electric and the fact that temps are falling is daunting. I can “pioneer woman” it for a while, but I’ll be honest…menopause woman is not as patient as I am.

I hope she doesn’t show up, things could get testy.

I make fun of that show “Doomsday Preppers” but I must admit that I can be a little on that crazy side. We live about 10 miles from a nuclear power plant and when I was preggo with # 3, I went through kind of a paranoid “circle the wagons” phase.

Then came 9/11.

Living in between DC and NYC with a nuclear plant 10 miles away….well, let’s just say I think I have done a pretty good job “hiding my crazy”. There are things I have done that my boys (including the hub) don’t know about and I’m not about to admit them here…but let’s just say….we will be ok for a few days.

Or a year.

One day in the OR (I work in an OR sometimes and we talk, ok? If we are not talking about the person on the table, we’re having a good day. 5 months of the year we talk about football, the other months are up for grabs. We have great informative conversations or we just tell stories and joke around.)  Once we were talking about “what if we got attacked” and “what we would do”. That’s where I learned about the possibility of an electro magnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Google it and be prepared to wet your pants.

I was so traumatized I couldn’t get out of that room fast enough…I had to get ready. Which for me, always starts with a trip to Home Depot.

My mind raced with how I could help my family be ready in the face of that kind of threat. Cars wouldn’t work so we would be STUCK. Anything with an on/off switch wouldn’t work and there would not be a truck en route from the power company to help.

I thought of several things that might come in handy (I’m not telling you what I did because this will be a survival of the fittest ordeal and I don’t want the hub make me return everything to Home Depot.)

I only hope with menopause mind I can remember where I put the stuff.

And compared to that horrible, pleaseGoddon’tletthateverhappen scenario, this ice storm is manageable.

That’s how I’ll get through it.

That thought and the fact that I’m leaving for Phoenix in less than 48 hours.

Adios.

Blessings,

Stephanie