Some of you already know that I live close to family and go over to their house often to take care of things that just need to be done. My sister is amongst the people that live over there and that relies on me some.
Yesterday evening, I had to leave girltime in a hurry because I had a phone call telling me that my sister was having seizures that seemed to have been caused by stress from an argument between her and her boyfriend (her boyfriend is exceedingly creepy and has a bad attitude and my sister is epileptic). So I logged off without saying anything and ran to her house. When I got there, her boyfriend and her were still fighting, even though she'd had a seizure. Well, I couldn't really do much and I didn't want to leave her there by herself because I don't trust her boyfriend and I didn't really want her to have another seizure. So as I'm sitting there, watching the whole thing unfold, her boyfriend takes off down the road and my sister decides we need to leave so she can chill out. So we decide to go for a drive.
We get into the truck and drove a little ways, then decided to go back to her house. Well, on our way back up the hill, we saw her boyfriend up the road and as we approached, he got the biggest rocks possible and started hurling them at us. Of course, I had to stop the truck because it was a narrow dirt road. My sister, being all distraught, and telling me how he'd never hurt her and how she loved him and just didn't want him to leave her, decided this was a good time to get out of the truck and start yelling to him how he loved her as he threw more rocks at us. The whole scene was beginning to resemble the redneck version of a scene from the TV series COPS (while I don't watch TV, I have seen enough of it to know about that particular show). Since my sister is out there yelling and rocks are flying her direction, I decide to get out of the truck to try to convince her to get back in the truck and to ask a person watching from the bushes in a nearby yard if I can borrow their phone. Finally succeeding, I tell her we're going to go find some help.
At that moment, her boyfriend tells her that if someone calls the cops, he's going to leave her. Now, I have been in her shoes. I know what she's going through. I understand what was going through her head and I knew what was coming and that there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. I have been in an abusive relationship before and I was a peer counselor (I'm still certified) for abuse victims for two years. I've seen it happen hundreds of times. I know what comes next - she doesn't want to lose him. Commence turbulent reparation processes. My sister tells the dismayed bystander not to call the cops and starts bawling about how much she loves her boyfriend again. The boyfriend then decides that he's going to get in the back of the truck and that we're supposed to drive him back home.
Well, this guy was just doing something that could have killed someone or seriously hurt them, so I didn't want him in the truck. At this point, I was not a happy camper. Now, normally I'm a very mellow person. I tend to try to be rational and I don't throw tantrums or get dramatic or make scenes. But this seemed to be the breaking point. My sister may be rather dysfunctional and she might be immature, but you don't hurt her. It is just something YOU. DON'T. DO! That's my sister. I've helped raise her since she was five. So, I got back out of the truck and walked around and looked up at her boyfriend sitting in the back of the truck. He started yelling at me about minding my own business.
"MIND MY OWN BUSINESS?! This was my business the moment I was called over! Don't fuck with my sister!" (Yes, I have a potty mouth and, yes, I made that ironic statement to him.) "She is not a piece of property, she is not a target and she is not yours to boss around."
He took a couple steps towards my sister, so I stepped towards him. Now, I should note, I don't really know what I was going to do if he tried to hurt her or I. I did take kickboxing more than a decade ago but I stopped because I felt guilty for accidentally hurting someone. I am pretty buff from dancing and exercise, but that doesn't mean I would be a very good defense for either myself or my sister. However, in that moment, I wasn't about to let him do anything to my sister without dealing with me first. So I stepped towards him more. The guy is slightly bigger than me and is well toned. He lifts weights all the time. He has been to prison before, but I don't know what he was in prison for. I think it might have been burglary. He looked at me for a moment and hesitated. I thought he was going to come after me and I thought I was ready for him (did I mention I wasn't thinking rationally? In situations like this, I'm normally the pacifist. I might think I want to do something, but I'm generally too passive to actually carry it out.)
He turned and ran, yelling, "COME GET ME, BITCH!"
I don't know why or if he really thought I would chase him. The whole point of me being aggressive was to protect my sister, if he's running, why the hell would I follow?
So I got my sister home, but he showed up very shortly after. The next scene was still right in line with what you might see on the COPS show, except, no arrest was made, no charges were filed, and I was still pissed as hell. My sister told the police that they were fighting and that he was throwing rocks at the hill, not at us. He, of course, verified the story. My story was different than theirs. The police talked to each of us, but didn't give me as much time as they gave my sister and her boyfriend. I heard most of my sister's statement that they got from her because she was the last person they talked to. As they were leaving, I told them that her story wasn't true and one of the cops turned to me and said, "of course it isn't true, if we thought it was, we wouldn't be here."
I've heard that before when dealing with other women in abusive situations where the police have been brought in, but usually it is over a phone after I've been counseling them. When it was my sister and I had to see it first hand, it hit me even harder.
And that is why I left in a rush yesterday and why I was gone the rest of the night. Sorry if I left you all hanging.
Now that I've typed this all out, I feel a lot better.
*kisses*
I just had one of the strangest, yet still very interesting days of my life. As many of you know, I often take naps in the afternoons. Well, this afternoon I was asleep in my bed when I was rudely awakened by a sometimes evil thing called the weather. In other words, while already getting insufficient amounts of sleep, my once-sleeping-and-intending-to-sleep-excessively plan (a. k. a. osaitse) was destroyed by thunder.
The thunder that woke me up was so loud that it made the house shake and was a sound equivalent to the earth being turned inside out like a sock with australia as the reinforced toe times 10^3489 (in other words, it was rather loud).
It took me a moment to realize that it was thunder that woke me up and that there was a nasty storm outside. Then, the power went out. At that point, I also noticed the distinct dense feeling in the air that lingers after lightning has struck nearby. It was everywhere in the house. It alters the feeling of the air, the scent around the air and is generally just adds a creepy feeling to the environment around you. Assuming that the house-shaking thunder was a strike down the hill from my house, I suddenly became worried about my Dad and Sister down the road and thought it might be a good idea to go make sure they were ok, despite there being such a nasty storm with huge gusts of wind and lightning so nearby (dumb thing to do, but I did it anyway).
So I went to my dad's house in the middle of a storm to check on him. Everybody over there was ok, so I decided to wait out the storm there and watch black-and-white movies on TV and pretend they were lead-in stories for porn (I kept waiting for Jenna Jameson to walk on screen in a cat-suit singing the Birthday Suit Song.
The storm passed over within a short amount of time but I didn't really want to go home just yet, so I stayed a little longer and didn't come home for a few hours. When it finally did come home, I was in for a shock. When I was leaving my house to come to see my dad, I was in something of a hurry, and didn't bother to survey my yard or so much as glance in any direction other than the direction my dad's house was in. Had I looked around, though, I would have very quickly discovered that not only had the lightning that woke me up not stricken the side of the hill below my house, but it had also been frighteningly close to my house. In fact, it had been frighteningly close to where I had been sleeping!
Just outside my window a tree in my yard appeared to have several branches just shorn right off. The tree stands about seven feet from my house and is less than ten feet from where I was sleeping. Thus, I was apparently only ten feet away from nearly certain death! After the initial shock wore off in realizing how close I was to lightening, which kills around 100 Americans per year, I decided to examine the more interesting aspects of what happens when lightening strikes and this, of course, involved pictures and the asking of lots of questions about ozone and why the air feels funny after lightening hits.
Here is the aftermath of my tree being struck by lightning:
It looks very much like a tree exploded in my yard. The stuff circled in purple in one picture are large chunks of bark. Some of them have black marks on them. When I first saw the black ones, I thought they looked like a tire had exploded with the tree. I thought it was interesting that several of the pieces of bark were very rectangular. There's huge black marks between the branches of the tree that are difficult to see in the pictures. I have a TON of debris in my yard from the tree. It seems tomorrow will be a day dedicated to cleaning up the yard from tree bits and finding some lightning repellant since I am not keen on the idea of having lightning land ten feet from me again anywhere near soon.
As you can see, the tree is fried. Poor tree.