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I don't know if anyone knows that I'm a member of a fluting circle (which I never attend due to time constraints and scheduling conflicts, but which I receive email from anyway.) Anyway, one of the flute makers in our region has been diagnosed with a serious cancer and is currently undergoing treatment. Even with insurance the costs are soaring, so the fluting community has been really trying to help raise money to help this contributor to our group. Currently, the above flute is being auctioned by another flute maker in our region, to donate the proceeds. Click on the link to see more about it. If you know anyone who might be interested in bidding on this item, please pass it around. If this flute sells for $500, that would be wonderful, and not one bit overpriced for such a lovely piece. These are not toy flutes, but beautiful hand crafted finely tuned instruments. Mine cost only $150, and is nowhere near as nice or beautiful as this one. I wish he had played it and recorded it's sound to post on Ebay too.

For more information about this flute and flutes like it, here is his main website: http://4windflutes.homestead.com/ There is a much nicer bigger picture of this gorgeous flute.

It's just so awesome to be on the Internet again.. Our OWN Internet, not someone else's. Whew... I finally got a hold of Time Warner again. For days and days and days all I got was "We're working as fast as we can to restore service in your area, we currently have XYZ number of people out of service due to the recent wind storm activity." So today, I get "there are no reported outages in your area" and I'm like SAY WHAT? So I got to a service lady finally, and she was like OH... REALLY? I'll have a technician out tomorrow. Well, he came within two hours. Kudos to her for getting things done. Now I just need to call back and get my email fixed.

Well, for those of you who are unaware, Ike came to Ohio Sunday afternoon, and pushed along at a pretty good clip by a cold front, we had Ike "Remnants" at Category 1 hurricane force winds in some areas. Our maximum wind speed in Dayton I think they say was clocked at 69 mph. further south it was in the high seventies I think Lebanon had 78 at one time.

Anyway, power is out for huge numbers of people. Myself included since Sunday evening. I'm posting this from work, so I'll have to try to keep it brief. For the moment we're doing fine. Most of our service sector in Fairborn is up and running, so we're faring better than some areas. Most of our outages are residential. (edit: and most residential is out) Unfortunately, that means that much of our damage is small fry back in the neighborhoods. So we're pretty low on the totem pole for repairs.

Restoration of Health and Safety have top priority obviously. A lot of people are annoyed, but they are ignorant to want THEIR power back when our hospitals have no power, and half the traffic lights in the region are out. Obviously area health care facilities will be restored first, then traffic signals etc, and then they will start working on neighborhoods. They say that they will prioritize the residential service repairs based on what repairs will restore the largest numbers at a time, and work their way down to the small fry. We're prepared to be without power into the weekend.

I was smart enough to pick up a bag of ice IN CASE the power went out Sunday afternoon and ran it by the house. so when it did go out, it was in the freezer. Lexi was smart enough when it went out while I was almost in bed, to take it out and put it in the fridge. So most of our food has been saved. Yesterday I found two more bags.

Let me just talk about ice for a minute. I'm really appalled at the boorish behavior of some people. Seriously. What the HELL does anyone think they are going to do with 14 bags of ice? I'll tell you what they do with 14 bags of ice. Instead of keeping your most important and least perishable supplies cool (medicines, smoked lunch meat, etc.) you are just loading your fridge with 8 bags of ice (which will last about two days before you need more) realizing that you have no room for anything else, leaving 6 out to melt, and meanwhile depriving the person in line behind you from the ability to save ANYTHING because you were too selfish to consider your neighbor, or to consider tomorrow. (edit: please note that two bags was more than sufficient to keep our fridge cool enough) (Same thing with you guys with three quarters of a tank of gas and nowhere to go except to buy ice who went and topped off your tanks and closed the only gas station in town so that the guy with a sick kid and a big red E couldn't get gas for an emergency. You people were asked not to do it, begged not to do it, and you did it anyway. Thank goodness I don't live in your town with you and your SUV.)

Okay anyway, so now that I'm done ranting about that. We're all okay here. There is miraculously power at both my jobs, so I'm able to work, and not loosing any money on this deal. A large tree fell in my back yard. Thanks to DP&L hiring a cheaper company to trim the trees, which meant that untrained non-English speaking (and probably illegal) Mexicans hacked on the ash tree in my back yard in spring, failed to notice the very poor health of the tree, failed to cut it down, weakened it further and half of it fell in the yard Sunday. It was lying on a cable attached to the house which I initially thought was the power cable but thankfully it was not. Then I thought it was the phone line, which didn't particularly disturb me because I don't have a phone, so no big rush there, other than I didn't want it to tear up the corner of my house.

Late Sunday, my neighbor told me his wife's nephew (I think) had a wood burning stove and would be glad to come over and chop up the tree. I told Larry, that would be great, and that he'd be welcome to that wood. So all day yesterday, they were working in the back yard cutting on that three. He says he will probably get a couple cords of wood out of it. He took one truckload yesterday of cut ash wood logs. (they are not leaving the county btw. We have ash bore quarantine here. They'll come back today and work on it some more.

Turns out the cable the tree was lying on was the internet cable... Time Warner came out and cut the cable yesterday and that's why they were able to start working on the tree safely. Unfortunately what that means for us is that we will have no internet either... obviously not until the power is on. Time Warner says that they won't even be looking at replacing that line until after the power is restored. So I'll be scarce until then.

Better stop now. Should try to do some work today. I actually have some for a change. I'll try to answer emails here and there as I can to let you know we're safe and well. We will probably spend a lot of time doing crochet. That's what we did last night. All the candles in one room.

Just too many pictures to steal them... Any of you who want to see my hometown inner city in all it's ugliness and beauty, take a look at the shots this guy has been taking right at the street level from his bike. It's awesome, that he takes pictures of more than just the 'culturally pretty' things and actually takes pictures of things that are literally interesting. http://realdaytonohio.blogspot.com/