Saturday, January 31, 2009

The plight of an over-protective herding dog

My New Year's resolution (to be boring) is slowly disintegrating. For the first time in my life, I am a refugee. Mine and BJ's new home was hit hard by the storms in Kentucky. We have no power, water, or heat, so we are currently at BJ's parent's house. We're okay, and, thankfully, our church members are doing okay, but it is going to be a very long time before things are back to normal. In fact, it is going to be a very long time before we have electricity.

If you want to hear more about everything, give me a call. For now, I don't feel like recording everything that has happened. Honestly, it is still just a little too hard to believe. Instead, I just want to tell one of the nuggets of a good story that has emerged from this mess.

Tuesday night was the first night without power at our house. Luckily (we thought), the church office still had power, so we settled down on BJ's futton and started watching movies on Netflix. At about 8:00 p.m., however, a tree fell into the transformer in Farmington, and BJ and I were forced to try and find a warm place to sleep. We found a place for us fairly quickly, but the dogs were a bit trickier. Most people in Farmington don't keep housepets, so BJ and I were going to have to lock them up in our frigid laundrey room. However, since we are one of those pathetic couples with no children who treat their dogs like they are their babies (yes, I realize we are that couple), the idea of this traumatized us. Thankfully, our normal dogsetter had a log fireplace and was at home, so we dropped the dogs off there.

At this person's house, there were about 8 people bunkered down (every house with any source of heat was full). Of course, these people were moving around trying to get settled into the one room with a fireplace. Sienna and Gus are pretty attentive, so they knew by this time that something was going on, mommy and daddy were stressed out and gone for the night, and things were dangerous outside. For Sienna, this translated into being neurotically restless. For Gus, this meant he had to save everyone under his domain of protection, which, 0f course, was everyone in the house. Anytime people would go near the door he would start pushing them around and herding them away from danger. It was as if he was saying, "Don't you realize it is dangerous out there?" Poor guy. He has so much responsibility in life.

I wasn't there to see it. I only heard about it after the fact, but it is still nice to know that despite how difficult the past few days have been, Gus is still Gus. He is still trying to take care of everyone, and it is a heavy wieght on those shoulders.

I would like to ask for prayers for everyone in our region. It is an odd thing going through a natural disaster of this magnitude. I don't know how to explain it, but just keep them all in your prayers.

No comments: