by Morinor » Sun Jun 20, 2010 10:01 pm
Day three, around mid-day and still in Mishawaka.
I had the day off from work. Watched the news all day... well, had it on in the background while i moved everything into the living room for rapid loading. Once they announced that they are sealing up Chicago due to riots and so forth, that tears it for me. I start loading up the car, including all the new groceries i popped for yesterday. The car is pretty full at this point, so I'm going to back it into the garage so no one sees it and lock it down while I wait for the wife to get home in an hour or so.
I shoot a call out to my wife, let her know that we're not spending the night at our house tonight and that she needs to make a beeline home tonight. The wife knows better than to ask why or how over the cells, but she tells me that she's going to bail 'on a family emergency' from work. It occurs to me that i should load skype on the laptop, so if the cell network goes down, my dad's satellite internet will let us get ahold of my kid brother in Korea. I then shut down the laptop, pack it in with the wind-up cell charger and other gimpy electronic stuff that takes up too much of my time right now, cursing the fact that i never felt that i should spend the money on a solar charger. I have a bunch of cool manuals saved in PDF on the laptop, but i never bothered to print them off, since i never bought a printer... I try to remember if my folks have one or not, but i can't recall, and get sidetracked ransacking the apartment for last minute, 'i wasn't thinking' stuff. A big can of cajun spices is a big oh-yeah, since i figure that'll cover up the bland taste of trail food.
Next call is to mom. Dad's at work for the moment, but he'll be home in a few hours. I tell her about Chicago, but she already knows. That's pretty much our balloon going up, since we were all born and raised out that way. I tell her that we should be circling the wagons. She says she'll call Xxxx, my other brother, who is a Paramedic/fireman for one of the small little cities on lake michigan. She thinks he just got off one of those murderous 24 hour shifts that they have.
Wife gets home, we debate taking both her car and mine up to the farm. She takes a few minutes to fish out clothes and whatever else i might forget because i am a man. We decide on taking just one car, as splitting up is stoopid. Gas up the car. I tell the wife to buy a bunch of her favorite candy bars while she's in paying for the gas She doesn't get it now, but I get a feeling she will and thank me later. We take the back roads the heck out of town, heading for the farm. It's going to be a slightly uncomfortable ride, but manageable. She insisted on grabbing the cats, saying something about mice and that they'd feed themselves, but their pitiful mewing from their carriers is going to drive me up a wall. I end up flipping off the NPR and blaring some bagpipe music to drown them out. Now they're confused, but I'm enjoying myself. I brought my chanter along, but i suck.
It'll be about 6 by the time we get to the farm, shortly after my Dad gets home. My brother shows up around dusk, wife and small children in tow, his German shepherd bothering Mom's border collie and aussie shepherd. We settle in for the evening. Mom made pork loin and dumplings, and dad is offering whisky for dessert. We start sorting out what we should be getting done in the morning as we watch the news on the satellite.
Right now, we're acting just like it's a little visit, but the tension is palpable. We all joked for years about the zeds, and had a plan, but it was always just a plan. My dad figured it would be political insurrection before anything else. My brother says that he heard some weird stuff on the job, and he has his radio, but it's eerily quiet. Then again, we're kinda far out. Our cells only get one bar when you're outside.
The kids get shuffled off to bed, asking to 'pet the kitties' one more time. My wife camped out in one of the bedrooms, let the cats out and closed the door, so they don't scoot outside just yet. I make a mental note to complain later. The wife has a few sick days to burn, and I have tomorrow off. My brother has the next day off, but he's fading fast thanks to his long day at work.
He heads off to one of the other bedrooms, his old one. I moved out before they moved to the farm, but the house has four bedrooms, some full of junk. Mom's been running around, trying to hustle the big blue tupperware things full of crafts, antiques and old clothes down into the garage, where I am sure a car hasn't been parked for thirty years.
I get out the laptop and get on my dad's satellite internet and realize how crappy slow it is all over again. The forums are all chatter and hard to tell fact from fiction, or dead silent. CNN isn't giving us anything we didn't get from the TV. We decide to chill, see about riding it out on the quiet. Nearest neighbor is a few miles away, and it's a summer home, the rest is just decent hunting ground that's more or less undeveloped. Paranoid me is thinking about long-term sustainability, mom's sheep, and digging in, but i keep trying to settle back down. I'll be staying up all night, as it is. I'll try to ring up some of my friends tomorrow. Only a few of them know where my folks moved to, and chicago going down is going to get some attention. But that's tomorrow.
