There's been a lot of talk about "apocalypses" lately, what with the Mayan calendar coming to an end on December 21st of this year.
12-21-12 Buy your Twinkies Now!
Yes, it has been all the buzz of late. No one really knows what's going to happen on that day (though I'm 99.999% positive that it will be absolutely nothing). Still, the actual "Mayan prophecy" (if you want to call it that) is supposed to be that the date will be an end to the world as we know it, issuing in a new era of peace.
Peace. That would be kind of nice!
I still don't think it's going to happen on 12-21-12 - but then again, how long is an era? Not a specific number of years, but it is a very long time. And what if it is all supposed to be more a "beginning" to an era which just takes time to get things "going" for say, oh... about a thousand years?
Or will it be a "half hour of silence in the heavens?"
Who knows! Either way, I'm sure there will be turmoil before that full "era of peace" actually makes it here in its full glory.
For me, in a small way, it has arrived today. Kamaron is sick, my broken leg is still... well, in a word - broken, Kirk is out of town on business and my refrigerator decided to die last night.
I noticed it didn't feel very cold as I was putting the lettuce away, and that the door seemed to be kind of hot around the edges but I was so exhausted after trying to do all my Christmas shopping in one evening (hoping to actually be able to focus on work again - fodder for another blog) that I plumb didn't listen to that little voice in my head which repeated over and over:
"You should fill some extra jugs up with water and put them outside to freeze... just in case."
All I could think was: "Okay, I'll do it in the morning..."
Well, morning came, the fridge was roughly 70 degrees inside, and our trash can is now full of previously perishable food.
However, there are some blessings to count from all of this!
#1 For some reason, only the fridge died. The freezer was still functioning, so I didn't lose all our frozen stuff.
#2 The fridge sorely needed to be cleaned out anyway...
#3 Even though I had to unplug the fridge (for fear of it starting a fire), we have a chest freezer in the basement which had enough spare room to fit most of the frozen foods.
#4 It's winter time! And while I have, admittedly, been complaining - a lot - about not being ready for winter, this morning I'm very thankful that it is keeping the remaining frozen goods frozen (the ones that wouldn't fit in the chest freezer)... as well as our remaining refrigerator foods cold.
#5 Also, that "little voice in my head" gave me a really great idea. Call it schizophrenia if you like, I'm going to call it something more religiously based, like a prompting of the Spirit. The point is: How many hundreds of years did our ancestors use the "ice box?" Some older people still call a fridge the "ice box."
Which brings on a small story:
When I was a little girl, we went on vacation to a cabin in the mountains that had one of these charming little oak and metal ice boxes. It also had army ants... but that's another topic. On the top of that charming hunk of oak and metal was a lid with a metal box beneath it, which held a big block of ice. The cold from that ice would filter down to the contents below it, keeping our great-grandmothers milk, butter and eggs quite cool and tasty. It would work for us too, if we gave it a chance, but I remember my mother looking at it and saying:
"Oh, look... a real ice box... OH LOOK! ARMY ANTS!!!"
And that was the end of the conversation. I was left to try and figure out how this awesome little contraption worked on my own. My five-year-old self discovered that there was a drain hole in the bottom of the metal box... though where it drained to I was never able to figure out.
When my children were little, I didn't want them to miss out on so much wonderful history; so each year, for home school, we had a unit on the pioneers, after which we would unscrew all of the lights in the house, turn the heater off and unplug the appliances, so that we could have a few days of seeing what it was like to live "in the rough."
We did laundry in the bathtub, the wood stove kept the house warm enough and the oil lamps were truly lovely. Then, at the end of our "activity" (which ended the morning of Thanksgiving) we reverted back to modern life and were so thankful for our many blessings!
Unfortunately, our experiment wasn't actually complete, because I secretly never unplugged the "ice box." We called it an ice box, and talked about the principle of using it as an ice box. For one of our activities we even discussed how we might go out on a lake, cut blocks of ice from the frozen surface, haul them back to our "ice house" and pack them with straw or sawdust to help insulate it all during the summer, making the supply last until the next winter.
It was nice in principle, but I'm kind of feeling like, now, I'm being given the opportunity to come clean of that charade and put the principle into practice for real. So...
#5 I'm thankful for the concept of "ice boxes."
... and
#6 Handy husbands who can try to diagnose what's wrong with our relatively new fridge when he gets home.
As an added bonus to this whole experience, whenever that apocalypse actually comes, and the metaphorical "zombies" take out our electric grid, I'm going to know how to survive just a little more comfortably without electricity than I was able to do before.
And... well, that's probably a very good thing.
