Back Online

I've been debating with myself whether to even bother, but in any other year I would have begun this post with a sentence something like so:

Holy crap, you wouldn't believe the storm we had last week.

For various obvious reasons, the likelihood of my obtaining your belief regarding last Wednesday's weather in our vicinity is quite high at present. And many of you experienced it yourselves, so all in all I'm confident of a favorable, if disinterested, reception.

Anyway, it stormed like heck on Wednesday night.

I would have told you sooner, but we just got our internet back this weekend, along with the cable. Good thing too, because I would not have been happy about missing West Wing.

Anyone else see the premiere? Man, it felt good just to be watching that show again. I've missed the pace of it. The dialog is so rapid and dense, it demands your full attention. There's nothing else like it. This should be a great season, even if the move to Sunday nights is, as some are suggesting, the opening bar of the death knell for one of the most decorated shows in television history.

But enough about the only one of the many deserving shows that I can be bothered to make the effort to follow; I was in the middle of saying we were without cable and internet for close to three days. Besides blogging, this meant we were deprived also of email, online (though thankfully not the other kind) poker, sudoku (for my addiction to which I curse KP), and continuous images of southern states in sodden states. And a tree.

Well, our deprivation of said tree was linked to our lack of electronic contact with the outside world only in their common cause. The storm, particularly its 80 mph winds, uprooted the largest tree in our yard, a thick, thirty-odd foot specimen of the evergreen/pine/fir variety. It was Toby's favorite tree; he used to love gathering pine cones from beneath it. The next day I took him out to show him the vanquished verdure. "Look Toby, the tree fell over!" He pondered for a moment, then bellowed forth his latest catch phrase: "Oh no!"

You have to know how cute he is to get this.



But we're thankful not to have been one of the quarter million homes without power after the storm, some of which are still waiting for their lights (and fridges) to come back on. And we're thankful to have driven home safely through it. And of course we're thankful not to be among those camping out in a football stadium or high school basement (the ones on cruise ships have slightly less of my sympathy) waiting to find out when they can go back home and start bailing out their own basement. So you won't hear me complaining.

But still, no sudoku...