Month: January 2010

I realize I’m not for everyone; I’m an acquired taste, I suppose. My writing is a little on the preachy side and I have a tendency to just put it out there – perhaps with a bit more tact than others (or perhaps not, depending on your perspective), but for the most part – I am who I am and when you visit me? You pretty much know where you stand and what to expect.

I have very strong political opinions and religious views and I’m not afraid to put those opinions and views out there. (They may be a bit diluted for the sake of trying to be fair and me not wishing to be a total jerk, but I daresay you’ll find more of the “controversial” issues on my blog than on a lot of other bloggers’ blogs).

I don’t suffer fools lightly. You’re more than welcome to visit, but please, check your whine at the door.

I say what I mean, and mean what I say.

For that, I suppose, you could call me a bold blogger. Though I’m certainly NOT as bold as I would like to be (I have friends and family that read me and for that, I censor myself. In addition, I don’t enjoy purposefully hurting someone simply because I CAN), but for the most part, if you’re any good at reading between the lines, you can usually catch my drift.

I blog without obligation and I plan on keeping it that way. I never accept anything from anyone so if you see a giveaway, a contest or even a review, I paid for these items myself and my opinion has not been altered in order to play nice with sponsors. I don’t like answering to anyone. I don’t like feeling obligated to anyone. I want the freedom to simply be me – for whatever that’s worth.

I simply don’t go down that road. I’d LIKE to go down that road. I’ve had OPPORTUNITIES to go down that road in the past, but when I sat back and weighed the pros and cons of being honest or tiptoeing around my opinion, I opted to go the no obligation route.

For the most part, I stay out of Internet drama. And by that I mean, blogging drama. And trust me, if you pay attention, at all, you’ll see what I mean. Does this mean I don’t have an opinion on the matter? Hardly. But I refuse to get sucked into juvenile games of he/she said and I’m CERTAINLY NOT interested in becoming one of the popular “elite” bloggers who everyone spends an insane amount of time kissing up to all in the hopes that they will notice them and perhaps accept them into their inner circle.

Though I would love to make friends online, and I have made some pretty awesome friendships thus far, that’s not my ultimate goal. My ultimate goal, for this blog, in my publicly writing to y’all, is to simply be myself. To document my life as honestly as I can without damaging my relationships in the interim. I honest to God only wish to leave a little piece of me behind to whomever is interested enough to care.

That’s all.

I ramble on Twitter. I have a tendency to just type the first lame thing that comes to my mind.

I do that, because THAT’S a big part of who I am. My brain has always moved faster than my mouth and I’ve always been the sort of person who starts something only to become distracted by something else later (SHINY!) I’m notorious for having big ideas and then not doing anything about them.

But the fact that I have those ideas is saying something, I suppose.

And you can tell when I’m in one of my moods because my tweets are all OVER the board. And they appear in rapid succession – random thoughts ricochet off my brain walls and just sort of dribble out of my mouth or ooze out of my fingers and onto the keyboard – it’s quite an attractive process, I assure you.

And it never ceases to amuse me the amount of followers I either gain, or lose, in one particular rant. I have a tendency to go OFF on politics sometimes and I never know if what I’m saying will offend, or reaffirm, what others think. Sometimes my numbers plummet, sometimes they sky rocket – it’s a crap shoot.

I almost always lose followers whenever I slip up and curse – I try very hard to keep the vulgarity to a minimum but come on, I’m human, that only flies for so long before the situation DEMANDS an expletive.

But here’s the thing – even though I’m thrilled when people follow me, or it saddens me a bit when people unfollow me, overall? I’m not overly concerned – I am who I am. I am me when I’m in a funky mood. I am me when I’m in a sarcastic mood. I am me when I’m feeling b*tchy. I am me when I’m feeling depressed. It’s all relative. I can’t be anyone else but me.

And I won’t apologize for that.

Take it or leave it. And I think that’s where so many bloggers go wrong when they start blogging. They feel like it always has to be rainbows and sunshine and get real – life is not always like that. After a while, feeling like you have to be something you’re not starts weighing heavily on your mind and you start finding it harder and harder to blog because you no longer feel like you can BE this persona, that you will disappoint people. That you will lose RSS readers or followers.

I hate to break this to you, but it’s impossible to please everyone. IM.POSS.I.BLE. So the fix? Just BE yourself.

Only better. 🙂

I guess I felt the need to write this post because of I’ve been reading how other bloggers are taking a stand to be more bold and are blogging without apolgogy this new year. I admire their determination to stay true and honest. Because blogging? Really IS all about you. And if you take YOU out of the equation? It gets rather boring, don’t you think?

So, this is me. Stay. Or leave. Either way, I will continue to be who I am.

Thanks for reading.

And that’s good to know, especially now that we have frigid temperatures and are very nearly confined to our house as it is. When it’s so cold outside that your eyeballs freeze on contact and you have difficulty blinking because your tear ducts have iced over, you know it’s serious business.

But seriously, have you thought about what would happen if you couldn’t leave your house? Or there was some sort of national emergency and you couldn’t buy the items you needed? Or the weather suddenly went berserk and you were forced to live like the pioneers with no electricity and other limited resources and you had to salvage all of your energy just so you could survive the long, cold night?

It can happen. In fact, my father-in-law is convinced that it WILL happen and has taken precautions (complete with buying a hand gun) in preparation.

Though I wouldn’t go so far as to agree with him on that “let’s panic and do something drastic” level, I DO think it’s a good idea to be prepared for the worst. You just never know what will happen and when you have a family to take care of? It behooves you to think ahead.

For example:

Three years ago, Springfield was one huge ICICLE; our fair city crystallized before our very eyes. We received FIVE inches of ice in the span of three separate ice storms. Our temperatures were frigid (sort of like now) and 70% of our city lost electricity. We, personally, were without power for 11 1/2 days – and yes, we were keeping track. It was one of the worst storms to hit our city in Springfield’s history.

We were crippled. People were fighting over firelogs, flashlights, blankets and kerosene all in the name of trying to stay warm at night. One whole family died because they didn’t know enough NOT to put their generator in the garage and the carbon dioxide killed them in their sleep.

People’s homes were being broken into because the owners left to stay at hotels until they got their power back. School was canceled for an entire week simply because they didn’t have any power.

In short, it was a mess.

Part of the problem, aside from the insane amount of ice we received, was that our trees simply … exploded. It was not uncommon to go outside and hear the constant BANG, POP, SNAP of tree limbs as they broke off and tore down our electric lines.

And let’s not forget the explosions and flashes of light as transformers blew throughout the city. And yes, we witnessed quite a few of those when we stepped outside to try and regain some semblance of reality.

Sometimes it was so loud it sounded like a gun shot had gone off. This was especially creepy at night. When it was pitch black (no street lights) and you had no idea where the sound was coming from and you prayed it wasn’t one of your own trees and/or a limb was about to come crashing through your roof. (This happened to a few people).

We moved our BBQ grill into the kitchen and we cooked a few meals on that. But mostly, we went out to grab some burgers. We lost a whole refrigerator worth of food. I spent the entire day preparing for the evening – making sure we had enough kerosene for our heater, making sure there was enough wood for the wood fireplace – we basically existed during that time period and nothing more.

We were completely unprepared for that ice storm. I remember walking around in a virtual daze for the first day or so because I simply didn’t know what to do. I kept expecting the power to come back on, after all, we had lost power in the past, but it had always come back on within a few hours.

When I was finally convinced that this ice storm was indeed SERIOUS and that it would be DAYS before we had any hope of getting our power back, only then did I snap to attention and begin to assess our situation.

We needed light. The evenings were the worse. There is nothing more depressing than sitting around in the dark and just sort of waiting around for bedtime. We needed heat. Our house got all the way down to 40 degrees and we were exhaling condensation – in our house. We needed the basic necessities to survive, in our own home.

Generators were hard to come by – everyone in Springfield was looking for one. Companies shipped generators in from surrounding towns and Kevin stood in line for three hours, in single digit weather, just so he could snag one off a semi-truck. Our lives became considerably easier once we got our generator. We kept it in our shed, well away from the house, but that meant we had to buy extra long extensions cords so we could plug it into our gas heater and warm up the house. The generator was only so much wattage, so it was a constant power compromise: turn this light off so I could turn this on, or unplug the house heater so I could run the hair dryer. It was exhausting.

The generator would periodically sputter and die at irregular and unpredictable intervals and our house would be plunged back into darkness. Lines began to form at the gas stations because everyone freaked out and thought there would be a gas shortage.

I wasn’t so much worried about not having enough for our cars, I was worried we wouldn’t have enough for our generator, and we would have to contend with the cold and the dark once more.

I can’t express to you enough the severity of our city’s situation. I’ve never experienced anything like it before in my life and I pray to God I never experience anything like it in the future, either. It was a living nightmare. It truly was. And I’m not talking about missing TV or my computer, I’m talking about not having heat and worrying about whether we would last the night.

In short, we learned a lot from that experience. We learned to stock emergency rations, to make sure we had plenty of candles and flashlights (the kind that don’t take batteries, you know, the crank kind), to buy a kerosene heater (we had borrowed my parents’ heater), and to have some sort of plan in place in case something like that happened again. Granted, the plan will likely change, depending on the emergency but at least we have SOMETHING, we didn’t have ANYTHING last time.

We are prepared now. And I figure we have enough food and supplies to see us through about three months, if we’re stingy with our food consumption.

It all sounds so third world-ish, I know, but honestly, it’s smart to be prepared, to have food rations and to have a survival plan if it comes to that.

We’ve had some pretty cold temperatures these past several days. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up until next week. Thank the good LORD above that all we’re having to deal with this go-around is snow – no ice. And our city utility company has spent months making the rounds and trimming back our trees to help ensure that if we get another ice storm, the tree limbs won’t knock out our power again. (One of the reasons we had such a wide-spread outage last time was because people started vetoing the tree trimming activities – you know, they wanted to be more “green” and as a result, it ended up coming back to bite us in the butt by leaving us in the dark for several weeks. Funny, I haven’t heard one peep out of anyone about trimming back the trees since then. And if anyone EVER says anything about wanting to stop it in the future, I will fight tooth and nail to remind them of the ice storm of 2007).

If there’s one thing you have to do if you live in Springfield Missouri, is be prepared for anything. In fact, Forbes Magazine named Springfield, in their wildest weather report story, as having the biggest variety of weather:

A slightly elevated city in the Ozarks at 1,266 feet, Springfield sits beneath unstable air (cooler air over warm air) which spurs high winds, including some tornadoes. All the leading weather variety towns are landlocked–land both heats and cools several times faster than water. Springfield is also just close enough the tornado alley area of the Gulf of Mexico to keep things interesting.

So, if you see me on Twitter talking about our weather? Now you know why. There is never a dull moment around here, let me assure you.

How about you – how long could you survive trapped in your house?