I am a mental slut

First of all, obviously, I’m okay. Really, the earth moving was just what I needed. It would have been nice if it had been because I was not alone in bed sleeping at the time, but you take what you get. My plan for yesterday was to do some bloggin because I had an epiphany or two on Saturday but after the earthquake threw me out of bed and the power went out, this was not going to happen.

I realized I am a mental slut when I had that nice Friday the 13th and talked to McYummy and was feeling frisky the rest of the day. The problem is that as bad as I may have wanted him that day, if he would have surfaced here I don’t know that I coulda followed through. Sure, it all seems great in my head, but in reality I have been celibate so long I would be more timid than I am in my fantasy. So at work that night at PH when one of the other drivers asked me how I was doing and I said “in my fantasy life I am scoring like a big dog”, at which point he high fived me, and I continued “in reality, it ain’t quite so pretty”, he laughed and it was then that I realized I am a mental slut.

It was 7:09 by my clock when I leapt into the doorway to my room after the bed shaking woke me up and then the house started shaking. Maybe 20 seconds later, Eric’s door opened across the hall and he stood in his doorway, said “we are in the middle of the Pacific, I think we’re okay” and I said “ya think?” in my head, and I just kinda looked at him and said I heard glass breaking. When the shaking stopped, I went to survey the kitchen for damage. I’ll get back to that in a while, kind of like I did when it happened. I went back to bed because it was my one day to really sleep in and the bed started shaking again, I tried to ignore it but then the power went out and the total silence was what made me get up.

The silence of a power outage is a big red flag signaling that appliances and fish tank filters need to be unplugged. So I did that and tried to lay down again but the aftershocks kept coming and sleep was eluding me. I had a smoke and pondered the implications, such as the lack of ability to brew my morning coffee and figured that since the filters were already unplugged and I needed something to do, I would go ahead and clean all of them. An hour later. That was all done and still no power. Then I set about the kitchen chaos. I had a vase with marbles in it sitting on the back of the stove, I don’t know why I had it stored there, but it was no longer up there. Maybe only Jody can appreciate the gravity of this, knowing this kitchen the way only people who have been in it can, but the vase was on the stovetop, marbles strewn more than ½ way across the kitchen to the steps by the door that are across from the refrigerator.

Well, crap. I had stuff I wanted to get done in town and I was thinking that maybe it was just our power on the mountain, and downtown was okay, so I was going to load some stuff into my truck and the neighbor lady was in her car and said that there was no radio either, just static. I jumped in my truck and started searching for any working station, like what we are spose to do in an emergency and tuned in 1 station that told me the first quake was a 6.6 and the first aftershock was a 5.8 and that 95% of the state (not just our island, but the entire chain) was without power, to stay off the phones and roads because without electricity they need the phone lines to land planes since the airport was down, too and there was no way to get gas with the pumps not running.

But being the rebel I am, I was going out. I had no way to keep abreast of the situation, having no portable radio at home, I needed to charge my cell phone (or at least I thought so, though it was pointless with the towers down) and admittedly this coffee ho needed her morning elixir. I went with a sense of fear for safety because I know some people are ignorant and might not treat the stoplights as a 4 way stop and I was not wrong. But I got to vent, yelling at stupid people and giving them that 4 finger display to indicate a 4 way stop. I felt for the people in the high rises who were trapped in elevators, just happened to think that my life wasn’t so bad without my coffee and could be worse if I was them. At least I had freedom of movement.

I was a woman on a mission, coffee, smokes and a portable radio. Fortunately I had recently purchased batteries for my ever growing collection of flashlights, but they were not telling me what I needed to know, like WTF was going on in my world. I went to my little Tobacco shop first and found them open, yay!! I expressed my delight that at least one of my weekly Sunday tasks could be done and my cashier guy said “oh yeah, we are in the business of selling addiction so we never close for anything”. Bless his heart.

One task down, I set out on the next, thinking since the stadium was open I could find food and coffee and with the flea market in progress maybe a portable radio could be found as well. I did find coffee and bread and fruit and one radio but no batteries. So I just wandered around and listened to the vendors’ radios and pretended to look at their wares while I drank my coffee. I left a couple hours later and headed for home. I spent the rest of the daylight hours in my room (where there was sunlight) and read a book until about 7 when I went next door to see how my neighbors were faring and since they were doing better than me, I hung out for an hour before I went home to get ready for bed. Still no power, did I mention that?

I finally got to bed about 9:30 when I couldn’t stay awake anymore and was awakened by Eric at almost 11 asking me how to restart the fish filters because Oscar was looking bad. I drug myself up, plugged everything back in, got the filters up and running and went back to bed. I was exhausted.

But in the course of the day I had time to ponder how most mainland people would cope with the loss of services for a whole day, how much do you take for granted? I know where I live that we will have power outages from time to time, with the storms that bring the trees down but usually things are okay everywhere else on the island and you can get out and do things until your service is restored. But with the whole island down it was different. And why couldn’t it have happened today when I was at work so I could get a freebie day off again? It was not much fun when my loafing in front of the puter and TV day is messed up and wasted.

The nice thing about it was the level of concern by my mainland family and friends. I got a voicemail from my daughter, who spoke so fast when leaving her number that I can’t even understand it, my sis, my son, and friends from Colorado (no, Tab, not McYummy, sorry). My east coast family members had no idea when I called to let them know I was okay this morning as they had not had the TV on for quite some time, except my mom for the ball game yesterday and apparently they had not heard about our natural disaster.

Sadly, it did knock our economy a little out of wack, with the airport closed and flights cancelled and most businesses closed, food lost to lack of refrigeration, but I think that will recover quickly. As a whole, people here deal with emergencies pretty calmly and take it all in stride without any panic or fanfare. The true aloha spirit.

Well, gee, the day is almost over at work already, strange how some time flies and other times it seems to drag on without end. Hmmm… More vacation stuff tomorrow, maybe we’ll get all the way through it this week

Until later, love love to you all…….