Holding Out Despite the Weather ... And a Few Random Notes

Hi all,

Since the last post, we're surviving nicely through the ice storm and now the snowfall of this weekend. Given that we only lost power on Tuesday morning, we are counting ourselves very fortunate, given the number of people here in town or who live out in the country who are still without power. Since we have power, we're actually helping our next door neighbor out by keeping their deep freeze running (with a very long extension cord run across the street, which until earlier this afternoon, had been blocked off due to the telephone pole shown in the last post). Fortunately, the city came by, pulled the old pole, and reset a new one. However, they didn't re-attach our phone wire ... we're waiting on that from Embarq, and that may take weeks.

The cleanup around town is beginning; a lot of trees were damaged, including ones on campus (which is significant because the campus also doubles as the state arboretum), and our backyard is full of fallen limbs (none of which hit the garage ... darn!). Odds are, we're going to have to hire somebody to chainsaw the debris and load it onto a trailer to take to a collection site ... we're holding off on that until we can find someone who will charge a reasonable fee: the last person we checked with was charging $200.00 a trailerload. We hope that after a week or so, prices will go down.

I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that my web browser stays open so I can finish this post. I recently upgraded to Firefox 2.0.11, and while Firefox has usually been a stable browser in the past, 2.0.11 seems to want to crash if I even sneeze wrong. Not sure what's up, but it's almost making me want to go back to using IE7 (and if anything, that should tell you how serious the problem is, since I swore off using IE years ago due to pop-up and malware vulnerabilities).

Come on, Mozilla ... you've had a good product, but this one appears to be a stinker. Get it fixed!

EDIT: The Embarq guys showed up Sat. morning to finish redoing the pole. And we were without power for about 20 minutes while the Aquila crews restored power to the rest of the neighborhood.