Why are you staring?

Christmas and my Dad

Well, I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! I sure did...and I'm glad it is over! I hate shopping. Yes, I'm a woman who hates shopping and I am one of a precious few. Twice a month they put me and others like me in a fenced area so those avid shoppers can come study the habits of "those they do not speak of". They record their research on the backs of mall receipts.

We had a good Christmas because we finally sold the house! It took three months to get that done and it was aggravating. However when all was said and done we were happy and it was all finished just in time. I went out and bought myself a little 1990 Subaru which I LOVE! We traded my two-wheel drive, rear wheel drive in on a mini-van, you have to understand, rear-wheel drive vehicles are absolutely useless here in the winter. As for my mini-van, oh ye or little faith, laugh if you want but I love with my mini-van. A friend laughed at me when I got my van and I looked at them and asked, "Oh yeah? If you get stranded where can you sleep in your little car?" That pretty much stopped the conversation. Now, I know that the four people that may actually read this are thinking, "Get stranded? Who thinks like that?" Well, I live in Alaska and you have to think like that.

We finally got ourselves a decent bit of snow and as usual people forget how to drive so the "ditch divers" (they actually call them that on the news) are out in force. In Virginia someone can have an ever-so-slight fender bender well off on the shoulder of the road and rubberneckers will tie up traffic for 45 minutes just getting past something that wasn't blocking them to begin with. Here, it is nothing to see three or four cars flipped over on the side of the road in a ten mile trip. As long as we didn't actually see the accident happen we commuters don't really pay attention. The other day, after a good snow, my friend Julie and I took off to go shopping (UUGH!!!) a Dodge Durango went speeding by us, kind of goofing off and weaving back and forth in his lane, generally being an idiot. I thought, "well, we'll see him again in a few minutes." Sure enough in another couple of miles we got slowed down to about 40mph and sure enough then Durango had left our side of the road, flipped, lost a tire in the median, and landed on the other side of the highway. My side of the road never even stopped. Seem harsh? This stuff happens all the time here....and they are usually four-wheel drives because for some reason folks think four-wheel drives are invincible. That particular guy was just being a moron.

I called my dad on Christmas just to find out from my step-mom that he had taken a 25 foot fall out of his tree stand on Christmas Eve and shattered a vertebrae in the middle of his back. Thank God he is okay but it was a rough trip.

My dad is 75 years-old and is quite spry in spite of it. He was out hunting and got himself a deer, he goes to step out on a branch before making his descent and that branch, then same one he has stepped out on many times before, gave way and down he went. He went to check on the deer and then crawled a quarter of a mile out of the woods, got in his truck and drove home. Long story short, he went to surgery and they fixed him. The doctors don't know how he has recovered so well as he is not reacting like a 75 year-old man would. They are still in awe of the fact that he is not dead or paralyzed. Anyone that knows him, however, knows how he made it. I talked to him this morning and this is how the conversation went:

ME: Hi dad, I heard you had a bad gravity day. You know Isaac Newton is right, I don't know why you keep testing that stuff.

DAD: Yeah, I guess I was wrong. But I got a deer!

ME: So I heard! When you are feeling better you can turn it in to one of those "fish stories". "There I was in my stand and I saw the deer right in front of me. I noticed that I had run out of ammo so I leapt out of my stand, landed on the deer and took it down in seconds using only my bare hands!"

I got off the phone with my dad after that because the nurse had come in to remove the catheter. That man crawled a quarter mile out of the woods with a broken back using two pine branches to help pull himself out and probably never yelled but I figured if he was ever gonna scream for any reason a catheter removal might be the trigger.

Hang in there dad!

posted by Shannon Land Post @ 11:35 AM