Days like this...

I hate it when you can't get a hold of your husband when it's a semi-emergency and when he finally calls you back he says in a very rushed, very stressed out voice "I can't talk right now I just got out of a helicopter." Me- "Oh, okay then, bye."

Here's the story: You know that fire we've been watching for the past two weeks? Well, it has finally left our area for good. Yea! Today we got a thunderstorm though. You know what a 35,000 acre high desert/mountain forest fire does when you get monsoonal rain pour in 45 minutes? Flash floods. Mudslides. During this 45 monsoonal downpour (I'm completely serious about the amount of water- unbelievable) Ryan is at work. Our power goes out. I think it's because of the weather. It is, kind of, but it's a personal problem because it's only the power to our trailer. I find this out AFTER the rain stops and I decide to go into town to get bread for church tomorrow. I usually make it in the bread machine. I go to lock up our red box and notice we have power there. That's a bad feeling. I go and look at the mess of wires that hook our trailer up to civilization and there is a heap of black, melted plug. Charred beyond recognition. Dental record burnt. It got so hot that it burnt some wood that was around it. The rain did it. And the rain put it out. So I take a picture of it on my camera and figure I'll see if I can meet up with Ryan so he knows what he's up against at home. No AC, no fans. I call and call on my call phone. I figure if I get pulled over, it would be by him, so it would work out perfectly. He doesn't return my calls. I go to Vons for bread, milk, and ice cream. I over hear some guy on his cell saying "You'll have to take the long way home, there was a 10 foot wall of..." and I didn't catch the rest. I check out and Ryan calls me as I am paying the lady. We have the conversation about the helicopter, if you can call it a conversation. I get a little sick to my stomach from stress, thinking that he's having a bad day and that he was probably holding some guys brain in his head while air lifting him to the hospital. (It's happened before, but in an ambulance not a chopper). I call my mom (the Internet Junkie) because I know she has the CHP website as one of her favorites. She doesn't answer, so I call the best source, my Brother-in-law Michael who is also a CHP. He calls dispatch and tells me what happened. Then Ryan calls me back later at home and tells me what happened. He got called out to an area because they kept getting 911 calls about flooding and it sounded really bad and no one believed them. Ryan went out to see if it was as bad as the callers said, and when he got there, it got worse! He said he was lucky to have been parked where he was and no where else because water was coming from everywhere. He said 20 foot spans of flood water were rushing everywhere. He was stranded, rivers of water on all sides of him, and radioed for help. A helicopter came and dropped a line 150 feet to pull him up. Then it took him to the high school and dropped him off.
I tell you what- that boy has all the cool stories.
I'll tell you what else, days like this make me long for a more normal life.
We still don't have power in our trailer. I am using my laptop and our dial-up connection to document the occaision. I have battery, but the battery system only turns on lights. No fans. And we do have a generator. And fuel. But guess what? We found out the last time we lost power that with our storage trailer parked right next to us, the exhaust from the generator comes into the trailer and sets off the carbon monoxide alarm. And tries to silently kill us. And the dog ate the wiring that turns of the generator from the inside. It's so quiet, I can hear the silence. And Ryan isn't coming home tonight. He has to go retreive his patrol car ("It's still stuck up there, it has all my stuff and my guns..." good thing I took out out NICE camera two days ago and forgot to put it back!) Seriously- it's a good thing Ryan is so manly and tough, because I would've cried.