It's just me home alone this week. Lauren is currently in Peoria, IL, after flying out Monday for her dad's open-heart surgery. Fortunately, the surgery went off without complications, and he's now recovering.
I would be there with her, but due to a slip-up on someone else's part at work, I had to stay in the office (or, in this case, work from home due to the roads and winter weather), and work on a project with a next-week deadline. I'm hoping (weather permitting) to follow her up there on the weekend, where we'll head up to Ottawa/Marseilles and spend Christmas.
It hasn't been all bad. Staying home has let me catch up on a few things and take care of a few items heading into the trip and the holidays. Working from home is pretty good when I can get it (sleeping in until 7 rather than 5, and no 2-hour down, 2-hour back commute, are both things I could get used to). As long as the internet connection stays up, I've got groceries, and the freezing rain/possible ice storm tomorrow stays the heck away from Maryville, I'll be fine.
Even so, I do miss her. A lot.
Showing posts with label Ice Storm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ice Storm. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Friday, December 14, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Sure Enough ....
Sure enough, the storm did hit, and we lost power right at 6:00. By 8:00, we had branches down. By 9:00, we had a telephone pole down and hanging over Edwards against the phone wires on the other side of the street. By 11:00, we were down to just my Treo to connect us with the outside world; our Internet service was out with the power and Lauren's cell service was out as well. Fortunately, the power came back after lunch, so I've been able to do some work apart from reviewing CBT notes for work.
Pics are above: the first two are of the back yard and show the downed branches and the telephone pole. The third is of the front showing the ice coating.
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