WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES

I was having a conversation with a coworker friend and he was telling me about playing Trivial Pursuit recently and discovering that lightning can heat the air around it as it strikes to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s five times hotter than the surface of the sun. First I wondered how close you can get to the sun before you evaporate into nothing. Like, how close did Icarus get before his wings caught fire? Then I wondered about all the stories I’d heard of people surviving lightning strikes, some of them multiple times.

The Weather Channel website keeps a list of lightning strike survivors along with a link to Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors, International (LSESSI), a support group for survivors. The list on the Weather Channel is a spreadsheet of names, location of strike and medical impacts. I scrolled through the list, reading the various medical impacts of lightning strikes. Burns and fractures seem to be a common medical impact. Someone on the list had to relearn how to read and write. Heart problems, ringing ears, memory loss. A couple of people experienced no side effects at all, which I feel is a bit remarkable. A few people claim to have “psychic abilities”, which did not surprise me. Let’s face it. If you survive being hit with something five times hotter than the sun, you are going to be left believing that there is something freaky special about you in some way.

The CDC has a whole wonderful section devoted to facts around lightning strikes. The odds of being struck by lightning in a given year is less than one in a million, which is crazy since there are about forty million lightning strikes a year in the U.S. Males are four times more likely to be struck by lightning than women. This does not surprise me. Every time the tornado sirens went off, Chris would be outside with cup of coffee while I would be finding a way for all of us to fit into the ‘safest’ closet. The ‘safest’ closet was always the smallest one. Statistical data for lightning strikes finds that most often people are stuck doing outside leisure activities like fishing, golfing, boating, and beach lounging, activities most available to white men of a specific age with a certain income.

So yeah, it makes sense that they are four times more likely to be struck by lightning. What doesn’t make sense is how we’re still allowing this kind of man (or any man) to make decisions on women’s reproduction rights, LGBQT rights, or racial equity. It’s pretty safe to say that waiting around for lightning to remove these guys is a waste of time.

Vote. Vote. Vote.

Because we are not lucky enough for a lightning strike.

CLOSED FOR REMODEL

Not really, but I feel like it.

As I am pondering some current feelings on remodels, I just realized that it is almost July. I generally lean towards feelings of deconstruction and rebuilding in the summer months. I don’t know what it is about the middle of summer and my need to tear down everything and start over. Right now, my feelings of ‘burn it all to the ground’ are exacerbated by my feelings on the current state of a country where I feel like me and my friends are no longer safe and/or welcome. Some have talked to me about seriously moving to Canada. Some of us are just too tired for the fight. I’m leaning towards being too tired. In middle school, I became an activist for the planet, denouncing pollution and handing out free seedlings. In high school, my activism turned to the AIDS crisis and sex education. In college and beyond, my activism turned to voter representation and getting people to the polls.

Today, my activism is in throwing money at Planned Parenthood and AbortionFunds.org.

One of the most valuable and most difficult lessons I learned when Chris got sick was that eventually, I must accept that there comes a time when there is nothing that I can do to fix things.

Do what you can, with what you got, where you are. -Squire Bill Widener

The consequences of accepting that there is nothing I can do to fix this current problem is to turn the fixing to the self. Saturday, I rewarded myself for no reason with a trip to the Container Store where I purchased things to reorganize the linen closet. The linen/medicine closet is now perfectly organized and I can tell you exactly how many COVID home testing kits we have. It’s six. We have six COVID at home tests. I also installed LED lights so we can now see all of the COVID home testing kits. When I felt like I’d done enough with that closet, I moved to the food closet (yes I know it’s normally called a pantry, but a brain fart years ago changed the naming the system). I threw out old snacks and cake mixes and reorganized all of the pasta. I’m not stopping there. I purchased a Bagster dumpster not too long ago that’s begging to be filled up with garage trash. I will most likely tear down this blog and rebuild it with new pictures and ways to purchase pictures and I might start walking around the house punching hand weights into the air (it’s exercise).

This is what I do.

When I can’t fix the big thing, I find other things to ‘fix’. Once, I almost rented a drain snake to cart down to my basement until someone convinced me that I could not physically lift a 200lb drain snake down the basement steps alone. That’s not true. I know how gravity works and still believe I could have gotten that 200lb drain snake down the basement stairs.

It’s the up that’s the problem.