My neighborhood has suddenly gone insane! The man and I were sitting here listening to a siren screaming as an emergency vehicle of some sort raced down the main street farther into the development, and we just rolled our eyes and said, "What now?" He and I are both going on fumes at this point in the day. We woke with a start at 4:30 this morning, with what sounded like a piece of Skylab falling into the Park. In his response to my "what the hell" exclamation, the man mumbled that whoever it was drove off, and then he attempted to go back to sleep, unimpressed. I, on the other hand, was a bit more curious, as I thought I had heard an explosion, and I was certain that our electricity was out. It was. I tried to tell myself it wasn't as close as it seemed. I didn't need to call 911 or anything, because it was down the street, and the person whose lawn was damaged would call the cops. I think I drifted back to sleep briefly, but by 5:30, I was up and out of bed in the cold and dark, trying to get a good photo from the one window that had a full view of the gang of utility trucks clustered on the other side of my fence, picking up the tipped-over light pole and deciding what to do about the destroyed transformer. Yeah, it was supposed to be me calling this one in. I'm lucky the idiot who was speeding in my neighborhood who flew off of the (25 mph limit) road only hit the transformer and not my fence and foliage as well. The man took the dogs for an early morning walk, like he does most mornings, and had a chat with some of the linemen. The consensus among those men was that whoever hit the transformer drove off, as if they thought they could pretend nothing happened. My man guessed that it wasn't a case of a stolen car, assuming a thief would have just walked away from a wreck, but I'm not convinced that's true. If a thief was far from home, he'd not want to walk home on a cold night, would he? Well, I wouldn't. But then, I wouldn't be racing through a quiet neighborhood at 4 in the morning.
It took until noon for the transformer to be replaced and our power to be restored. This meant that for my consultation with a new doctor this morning, I had cold water and a wash cloth in place of a shower (one drawback to the tankless water heater), and I tied my hair back in a braid, trying to pretend it wasn't slick with lotion from my massage yesterday. (For the first time ever, a surgeon's office had me pose for a picture so they could be assured in the future they were operating on the right person -- this is necessary? Could the timing have been worse?) As badly as my day started out, the morning seems to have flown by. The surgeon wants to do what surgeons do. He says it's time to do the cutting. I'm completely flustered and I don't know how to feel about the idea of losing yet another piece of original equipment out of my torso. The idea is that people whose diverticulitis "smolders" like mine, meaning it doesn't respond to antibiotics but instead just lingers for months, only start to improve when the affected tissue is cut out. The statistics say that only a quarter of people with diverticulosis (the condition of having the little pouches in the intestine) ever get the infection(s) that become diverticulitis, and only 5 percent of those people go on to need the surgery. Trust me to make that particular cut.
When I arrived back on my street, I started noticing things. There were two sheriff's deputies calmly getting out of their vehicles, and wandering up to a neighbor's door. When I pulled into my driveway, I noticed that another neighbor's garage door was broken, knocked sideways off of its track. A third neighbor has her house up for sale, and I'm starting to wonder, what if today was the day the perfect buyer was scheduled to come by and view her house? Can you imagine what an impression our block makes today? No electricity, a wreck directly behind the house for sale, a damaged house, and cops on the corner. Maybe once I've had a good night's sleep, this place will be back in order tomorrow. It's got to get better from here, because right now, this place is off its axis.
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