Worry

I'm a worrywart.  Always have been, looks like I always will be.  My mother told me that I was just like my father in that respect.  He would worry so much that he'd get up in the middle of the night to drive around the neighborhood until he relaxed enough to go to sleep.  Mom finally got him to take a pill for anxiety by pretending it was a sleeping pill.  He'd have worried endlessly had he known he had anxiety.  But, he was ok with taking a sleeping pill.  Go figure.

I don't know why I worry so much.  I can't think of any problem I ever solved by worrying about it.  And, I can't think of any situation that didn't eventually work out in a way that I could manage.  So, you would think after fifty plus years I'd have realized that worrying is pointless and I should just stop doing it!  Yeah, just stop!  Once I figure out how to just stop worrying, I hope I can figure out how to just stop eating junk.  But that's food for another blog.  (Food? Eating?  HaHa.  I'm so dang punny.)

Today's major worry is Hurricane Sandy.  The repeated calls to my house from the county disaster center have me ready to pack a bag for the nearest shelter.  The 24/7 newscasts have convinced me that I am in a lot of trouble.  I have not boarded up my windows.  I just know the hurricane winds are going to blow my front window into shards.  Poor little Trixie will be swept up in the furious winds, funneled out the hole in the window,  and blown away, never to be seen again.  I will step on glass which will infect my foot, cause gangrene, and leave me a partial amputee who's afraid to walk with crutches.  Yep, I worry too much.  I doubt I'd let the leg get gangrenous.

I don't have a generator.  Years ago when the power went out for a few days, my neighbor shared her generator with me.  The storm was over, the night was humid, and I was wide awake worrying about my silent sump pump and refrigerator.  As I lay in my bed, I could hear a voice whispering loudly, "Barbara! Get up and get out here and help me."  My neighbor was standing outside my bedroom window.  We were Lucy and Ethel in our nightgowns figuring out how to set up the generator a friend had loaned her.She saved my sorry unprepared butt, not to mention a refrigerator full of groceries.  However she has moved (just down the street, but too far for an extension chord to my house). The 24/7 newscasts have convinced me that we will be without power for days, maybe weeks. Maybe if I cook some of my freezer food on the grill I purchased for $3 at a yard sale this summer,  I won't starve.  I know I'll have plenty of water though because my basement will flood a few feet deep.

Could this Frankenstorm be the end of the world???

Maybe I need to stop reading so much.  Books deeply affect me.  A year ago, I read Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. It taught me that life as I know it can end catastrophically due to the unpredictability of nature and our universe. Here's the review:

From School Library Journal

Grade 6-8–Pfeffer tones down the terror, but otherwise crafts a frighteningly plausible account of the local effects of a near-future worldwide catastrophe. The prospect of an asteroid hitting the Moon is just a mildly interesting news item to Pennsylvania teenager Miranda, for whom a date for the prom and the personality changes in her born-again friend, Megan, are more immediate concerns. Her priorities undergo a radical change, however, when that collision shifts the Moon into a closer orbit, causing violent earthquakes, massive tsunamis, millions of deaths, and an upsurge in volcanism. Thanks to frantic preparations by her quick-thinking mother, Miranda's family is in better shape than many as utilities and public services break down in stages, wild storms bring extremes of temperature, and outbreaks of disease turn the hospital into a dead zone. In Miranda's day-by-day journal entries, however, Pfeffer keeps nearly all of the death and explicit violence offstage, focusing instead on the stresses of spending months huddled in increasingly confined quarters, watching supplies dwindle, and wondering whether there will be any future to make the effort worthwhile. The author provides a glimmer of hope at the end, but readers will still be left stunned and thoughtful.–John Peters, New York Public Library

See? See? Oh the damage that can be caused by wild storms!  tsunamis! volcanism!  And I did not gather supplies!  I don't have a battery powered radio! I don't have batteries!  We're all gonna die!!!!

No, not really.  I'll be ok after this storm and so will you.  Maybe I'll need to have some repair work done to the house.  Maybe I'll lose a boatload of groceries.  But I'll be ok....if I could only stop worrying.