Category: Glimpses of Life

Heading upstairs to the second floor of the house to find some cleaning supplies, I grabbed what I needed and happened to look out the window and saw “it.” I’d seen her before — brown and white, traipsing through our wooded lot as if she owned the property.

Since I had the garage door open and didn’t want her to enter nor to eat my outdoor plants, I hurried downstairs, opened the inside door to the garage and headed to the garage door entry.

I was going to protect my property from — her.

And there she was – taller than my 5’1″ height. She looked at me and I stared back. She looked away then looked back at me. Long periods of stares went back and forth.

All of a sudden the doe looked as if she was marching. One hoof down, one hoof up, one hoof down, one hoof up. Hmmm … being the curious person that I am, I marched too. One foot down, one foot up, one foot down, one foot up. I stomped to match her marching.

The doe stared at me expressionless. Then she did her “march” again. One hoof down, one hoof up, one hoof down, one hoof up. Hmmm … what a silly game I thought. But, okay, I’ll play along. One foot down, one foot up, one foot down, one foot up.

Not to be outdone, the doe repeated her “march” one last time. One hoof down, one hoof up, one hoof down, one hoof up. And I, finding the situation quite comical, decided to march in place one more time. One foot down, one foot … oh, wait. Then I saw it — a fawn who was oblivious to any danger grazing behind the doe.  And that’s when it dawned on me that the doe was protecting her fawn and that this was no game.

Suddenly it occurred to me that this doe was bigger than I was and she had the ability to pounce on me if she wanted to. The situation didn’t seem comical anymore as the doe was about 15 feet away from me.

Remembering my bear training (well, okay — what I saw on TV), I flailed my arms and yelled “get out of here.” She turned and ran with the fawn behind her.

Heading back into the house, I decided to Google for information on doe marching. Just as I had suspected, I learned that this doe was not marching or playing. Instead she was issuing a warning to me — I’m protecting my fawn. She didn’t care that I was trying to protect my property and was totally oblivious to that fact.

Life is funny sometimes. When we think we are having fun, warning signs abound that there is danger. Only when we remove ourselves from situations can we sometimes look back and discern how much danger we were in.

The Minnesota storm this past weekend left me feeling quite anxious. I’m not sure exactly why.

We had warnings of the impending severe thunderstorm early in the day and as the time came closer we watched the TV weather satellite to see when we would get “hit.”

As promised and expected, 58 mile per hour winds whipped through our neighborhood. Shortly after it started, we lost power. Not good for us folks who are on a well system.

With the wind whipping our trees back and forth and large droplets of rain falling, we headed to our basement “just in case.”

We were fortunate that shortly after we moved into our house, my mother-in-law gifted us an Eton Microlink FR-160 which is a self-powered Solar AM/FM/NOAA weather radio with a flashlight and cell phone charger. It works beautifully and was a godsend during the storm since cell phones, TV’s, radios and anything that needed power did not work.

Later Friday night (the first night) we kept seeing cars turn around in our driveway. Because the rain and wind had died down, we headed outside and saw that a large tree branch had fallen and blocked both lanes of the road. Fortunately there is more than one way to get in and out of the neighborhood.

Around two in the morning, I heard commotion outside. Looking out the window, I saw that there were city trucks removing the large branch that had fallen.

The next morning we still did not have power. I still felt anxious and couldn’t understand why. We did not want to open the refrigerator or freezer doors for fear that the power might be out for awhile and the food would spoil sooner rather than later. We headed to Dunn Brothers for a quick hot drink.

On the drive out, we saw many visible signs of destruction. Trees were strewn everywhere on or near houses. Electric, cable and phone wires hung precariously low to the street. Our neighbor across the street had a tree that fell on his house bringing the electrical wire with it.

We were most fortunate — the one tree branch that fell on the street was the worst of our problems. There were other large branches throughout the property but they were out of the way except for one small tree that we needed to cut down that was hanging over the driveway.

As the day wore on, my anxiety increased. Bleh. We went for a drive later in the day. I didn’t head to church as over 500K people lost service so I figured the church probably had lost service also. No sense driving 30 minutes to find out as I had no one to call — most people were at a weekend church retreat.

After Saturday passed, we woke up Sunday to more of the same — no power, neighbors trying to clean up and move large branches off their properties.

We headed out for breakfast and came home. We didn’t want to clean too much outdoors  as we had no place to shower if we continued to lack power. So — we decided to go window shopping for furniture. The trip proved somewhat fruitful as we found a nice bedroom set that was on sale. But, we are slow folk in making decisions on whether to make a purchase so we took pictures and information on the pieces we were interested in and left.

Once back home, we noticed that our “across the street” neighbor had another neighbor sawing his trees into pieces.

Oh! What a sight! Our 89 year old neighbor was struggling to bring those branches to the side of the road for the city to eventually pick up. He does have a son whose about our age but he has physical problems and was also struggling.

So — being neighborly, we put our work clothes on, grabbed our work gloves and headed over. I had to “fight” with the neighbor though because he looked at me and said “No, Norma, you don’t have to help.” Kidding around I said to him “Bill,  if you don’t let me help but let the men help I’ll have to file a gender discrimination suit against you.” We laughed and I picked up some brush and dragged it down the driveway.

Within an hour, a city contracted truck pulled up and said “You have power now.” What sweet words those were to my ears! My husband rushed to our house to check for power, the neighbor checked inside his house and yes — we had power.

I was so thankful! The weather, although hot, had not been unbearable. The mosquitoes were out although not as many as I had anticipated. I did receive three “welcome to the summer” mosquito bites. Grrr …

Back home we took showers, headed out to dinner and came home to relax.

For reasons unknown to me, I couldn’t relax during the storm and power outage. My anxiety, although within, was high. Has that ever happened to you? It’s not like there’s anything one can do when the power goes out. But life does not continue as usual.

I would think that anxiety shouldn’t be so high especially since one is safe and has “down time.” No?

Oh well … it didn’t work for me.

Afterwards, I thought about how I had anticipated and desired the power to come back so much so that my life could go back to “normal.” And then it hit me — do I desire and anticipate God’s Holy Spirit power in the same way? I wish! The electrical power can always be done without — but the Holy Spiriti power? I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Him in my life.

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Our outside adirondack chair had gotten to look pretty raggedy. Parts of it were peeling and other parts were okay. What’s a woman to do?

Of course! I decided to make this one of my summer projects and it came out beautifully!

After reading all the “google” suggestions, I put most of the suggestions together (they didn’t seem to agree) and go with my gut. My chair had water damage from being neglected for so long.

I was told by a friend whose a carpenter that I should strip the whole chair. Uh, no. That’s not what I decided to do. Instead, I used different grits of sandpaper on different parts of the chair. On the parts that didn’t have any peeling or were semi-peeling, I used 80 grit sandpaper  to roughen up the stain so the new stain would adhere to it. I was not looking to sand the old stain off — just “rough it up.” (This is one of those times in my life where I can say I “roughed” something up. – laughing)

On the arm of the chair that had the water damage, I used the 80 grit sandpaper then 100 grit then I finished it off with a 220 grit to make it very smooth.

After I finished all the sanding (including the underneath) I took a clean almost wet rag and wiped off the sand from the chair. Then I let the chair dry overnight.

The next day, I took my hand and felt the wood to make sure that nothing needed to be redone. Now I was ready to stain the chair.

In the garage, I had some leftover Cabot deck stain and pondered whether to use it on this chair. The color was much darker and that would be a good thing as it would cover the “reddish” color stain very well.

Using a natural bristle brush, I stained the top of the chair and allowed it to dry. The next morning I stained the bottom of the chair and allowed it to dry.

I stained each side three times and allowed overnight drying each time. It appears to have worked perfectly.

I could have applied a clear polyurethane varnish on top of the stain but I decided not to as I think three coats should be plenty. Overall, the project took 3 weeks because I had to have a “life” outside of working on the adirondack.

Now — on to another summer project. And I bet  you thought all I did was cook, eh?

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