Comfort Zone

The definition of the good life is living in the middle of a 9 acre field with a moderate but comfortable house and detached shop. Living in the country without all the headaches of actually having to make a living off the land with good neighbors and family all around you is the epitome of a safe and comfortable life. Throw in having the space to do some woodworking strictly for a hobby and not as a necessity is icing on the cake. It’s the perfect recipe for getting too comfortable. When you get too comfortable something unexpected and sometimes costly will happen.

That is exactly what happened a few days ago for us, we got too comfortable and we got sloppy. I have been playing around with woodworking, on a very small scale, for the better part of 30 years; nothing special, just as a hobby. It has been enough that I am familiar with power tools and power tool safety. None of that seems to matter when you get comfortable with what you are doing and get in a little bit of a hurry, that’s when the power tools fight back and most of the time, they win. I was doing a simple test cut on a table saw using a piece of scrap wood that was too small and not using a push stick or any other precautions. That’s when the table saw decided to argue with me and try to show me who was boss. Well let me tell you, I now know, it is. It just let me take advantage of it’s abilities as long as I respect what it is capable of. I got off lucky though; I didn’t lose anything; it just barely bit the tips of two fingers, really just the finger nail on one and enough of the second to leave a small scar. It was a lesson I won’t forget soon. Now after being stupid I did the right thing and had my smarter half take me up to the hospital to get it checked out. That’s when the second step of getting too comfortable jumped up and bit us.

Where we live we are surrounded by lots of close and distant relatives and friends. They all know that we spend a lot of time on the road so they all try to keep an eye on our house while we are gone. To top that off my parents live not more then 200 yards from us with nothing blocking their view of our house. All of this means that we often leave the house unlocked when we are going to be gone for just a short period of time. When we left the house to go to the hospital we didn’t even think about locking the house, I wasn’t thinking of the house and my wife was worried about me, not to mention the fact that so far this has been a safe and quiet neighborhood for quite some time. After I finally got through the sign in process and the initial checks by a couple of nurses assistants and a PA we were able to call my parents and let them know where we were and that I was fine. After we called my Dad walked over to our house to clean up the shop since I left in a hurry, lock up the house and take our dog over to their place. After 5 hours in the ER we finally get home, drop everything on the counter and head over to Mom and Dads to let them know I’m fine and to finally eat diner. So far everything seems normal, well, as normal as it can be after arguing with a power tool that shows no mercy. By the time we got home I was ready to just sit and watch a little TV, that’s when reality hit. Our TV, 2 laptops and 2 brand new bottles of whiskey were gone, not misplaced, gone. There was no evidence of any type of forced entry so it appears someone just walked into our house during the time between when we left for the hospital and when Dad came over and locked up, maybe 2 hours at most in broad daylight. I’ll give them this, they were either real gutsy or they were real stupid. In our case we were real lucky.

The reason I say we were real lucky is that I came off with just slightly more then a cut that hasn’t given me any problems and we lost very little in the burglary. Other then feeling violated we learned some lessons that could have been much more painful. The feeling of being violated will diminish in time but the reality of there being people that have no respect for others will not go away.

These are the same lessons that seem to have been forgotten in America with respect to our Politicians and our Government. The American People got comfortable in letting the Government run the country unchecked; we left the back door open because we thought we were safe with their decisions on what was best for us as a country. We, as a country, kept allowing the President to take more and more power until the office of the President has become a power that has no mercy. We were comfortable and we are now about to pay the price. Hopefully there is still time for us to make sure that it is price that won’t be too high, not one that could end up crippling the United States forever or taking everything that is valuable or precious to us, like our individual earnings or even more painful, our freedom.

Steve Avery
4/13/11