Should Disaster Strike

I want you all to know that if ever a disaster strikes, Blake and I will be prepared because this weekend was all about learning how to be just that: prepared. Let me highlight a few of our skills.

On Saturday we participated in the 2^nd Annual Community Preparedness Fair, sponsored by both of the Muncie wards. It was a huge ordeal, months in the planning, and it filled the entire church building with dozens of booths on topics such as preparing 72-hour kits, home food storage, gardening, and (my personal favorite...) mental and emotional health. Lots of local government and non-profit organizations contributed as did a rather large handful of members of the church. The Red Cross was there, the fire department, the sheriff’s department, and a number of city and county health departments, to name a few. There were also at least two totally unqualified people manning that above-mentioned booth on mental and emotional health. Yeah…that was where Blake and I spent four (very long) hours on Saturday afternoon, where we apparently were subconsciously encouraging people to repeatedly ask us, “So, are you handing out free mental health here?” I’m still not 100% sure why everyone thinks we’re so incredibly qualified to enlighten the public on this topic (because we’ve tried to explain to people that Blake’s near-earned masters degree in psychology will not qualify him to run clinical counseling sessions, but will rather help the world understand how a human’s mind reasons and logically processes information…apparently they’re not listening). But, even so, I made a pretty darn good looking display board (if I may say so) highlighting brief snippets of information on how to maintain good mental and emotional health (get enough sleep, eat healthy, and don’t forget to exercise) which I gleaned from the internet. (Thank you, Internet!)

Blake and I both prepared for a another week of work by watching all The Office: Season Two on DVD. It was our turn to check it out from the library, and we only had 3 days to cram in as much viewing as possible. Because of our time restraints, we were unable to watch the deleted scenes and other extras, but we did manage to learn a lot from our friends at Dunder Mifflin that I’m sure will keep us sane in the coming work days. Here are a few things we learned:

• Don’t sleep with a George Foreman grill at the end of your bed, especially when there’s bacon cooking in it.
• The rules of Jinx are unflinchingly rigid.
• Never trust the HR guy when he tells you he’s sending your complaints to a special file in New York.
• Office Olympics are a great way to waste time.

All of this preparedness was put to great use this morning as Blake demonstrated his heroic ability to save our fish, Friedrich’s, life. Apparently sometime between last night when we cleaned his bowl and this morning when we couldn’t find him in his bowl, Friedrich has gotten himself stuck underneath the rocks at the bottom of his bowl. When I went to feed him this morning and got no response from him (yes, we have an eager-to-eat fish who gets overly excited when the food comes out), I shook the bowl to make him swim up to the top. Only he didn’t come up. I searched and I searched and when I finally found him, he was looking up at me in a comically pathetic sort of way, as if to say, “So I, heheh, was, uh, playing hide and go seek with myself, when – you’ll think this funny – I, uh, somehow got myself lodged under these rocks…heheh…and, uh, I can’t seem to get myself out.” Because sticking my hand in fish water is something I usually prefer not to do, I called to Blake, who when he saw the situation (and finished putting on his shoes), swooped in, rearranged a few rocks, and freed Friedrich. Luckily he did not have to perform fish CPR because that was one item of preparedness that was not covered this weekend.

(Okay, so maybe watching many hours of The Office and manning a booth on mental and emotional health didn’t exactly teach Blake how to save the fish…but it was pretty heroic watching him save the little guy from a death by river rock crushing. And I love it when Blake totally saves the day.)