The Next 10 Hours

The cool thing about a blog is that I can update it from anywhere at anytime...as long as I am near a computer of course.

It's 11pm on a Wednesday night and I'm sitting in the Crisis Center. I agreed back a while to take overnight shifts on Wednesday nights into Thursday mornings. My shift tonight is from 11pm-9am in the morning. 10 hours. Yes...10 hours of my life where I am devoted to the phone and the receiver sitting on the desk in front of me. I don't know what to expect. A person could call me and tell me their heat is messed up and their house is cold and they don't know what to do...or I could receive a call from a person who says they have a gun in their hand and they're contemplating suicide. I never know what to expect when the phone rings. But, I had to do 40 hours of training to work on the hotline and I am pretty confident I can handle whatever comes my way.

Much of my day was spent relaxing and scoping out the deals for Black Friday. Me, my friend Dana, and her mom Rita have made it a yearly habit of fighting the crowds at 5am on the day after Thanksgiving. I am very excited. I always end up buying a lot of stuff for myself. My goal this year: to obtain the $99 Garmin Nuvi GPS that is at Best Buy. I will be in line at 5AM to get it. I have read reviews and compared it to the many other GPS deals that are being offered, and I feel that particular one is what I want. As much as I travel, I have never owned a GPS. I would like to have one and I think it will be beneficial to me.

I spent the day at my cousin Misti's house and then me and Dana ventured into Abingdon for the evening to have frostees at Wendy's and to loaf around Roses. I went back to Misti's for a while then left to come here. On my way down her driveway, a rabbit ran out in front of me. But, when I expected it to keep running, it didn't. It had no choice. Something was wrong with it and it kept rolling around on the ground. It was moving around but it could hardly walk. It reminded me a lot of my cat that contracted "milk fever." I sat there with my headlights focused in on this rabbit for about 2 minutes and I desperately wanted to get out and help it...but I thought I shouldn't because it could have had rabies or something. The sight of that helpless rabbit stuck in my head for a while after seeing it. I'm not sure why it bothered me so bad, but I think it teaches us a lesson. We are able people, and we have the responsibility to help those who can't do the same things as we can. Tonight, I should have helped that rabbit, but I really didn't know what I could do to help it.

A possibility: the next crisis call a receive will be someone who has helped a rabbit in distress in the past and they will tell me what I should have done. I learn more from the calls I receive and the people I talk to than I could ever teach someone else over the phone.

Until next time, Zach will leave it at that.