Karen took this picture a couple days ago.
It’s the first we’ve seen in 2009.
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around home
Since we no longer have any cats, we seem to have a lot more critters in our yard. Granted, we do live in the country, but we’ve never had so much wildlife actually in the yard.
Of course, it’s mostly small stuff. There are at least 5 different squirrels, a couple of rabbits and lots of birds — many of them regulars at the feeder. Deer aren’t unusual and, while it’s been a while, sometimes we see wild turkeys.
Today, though, we were sitting on the front porch reading and I thought I saw a small dog heading across the yard. I looked closer — it wasn’t a dog.
It was a fox. It trotted lazily across the yard in front of the house and across the driveway into the woods.
I know that there are foxes in this part of Arkansas. I’ve seen one two or three times over the years on my way to work.
But in our front yard in broad daylight while we’re sitting on the front porch?
What’s the chances of that?
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I’m currently working on a new Woolly Hollow State Park page.
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Other than the 7 trees that we lost earlier in the year, we’ve not had any other losses — until this last weekend.
It’s a good thing that I had pre-published some posts in advance. We were off line from Sunday through Wednesday as a result of the storms that blew through here Sunday afternoon.
We noticed that we didn’t have internet access at some point after the storm was past us. It didn’t come back that afternoon and evening and wasn’t back when I got up in the morning. Assuming that it was a problem somewhere down the line in town, I went off to work thinking that it would be back up by the time I got home.
Wrong…
It wasn’t, so I called the phone company’s high speed internet support number and — after waiting forever for a service person to come on line — went through the steps of proving it wasn’t anything I could resolve from this end. At that point I was told that the company would send someone out on a service call the next day, Tuesday.
Didn’t happen…
There was no change in the modem status when I got home. It still wasn’t connecting — no matter what I did. So I called the service center again. This time the wait was very short. They promised someone would be out on Wednesday.
Finally…
The problem was an easy fix. The modem had gone out as a result of a lightning induced power surge.
On Sunday, while I was taking a shower, there had been a loud crash of thunder — close enough and loud enough that I recall feeling the jolt through the floor of the shower!
I hadn’t thought about it after that as we had no obvious damage anywhere. However, the lightning must have struck directly across the highway from us. One family lost a number of electrical components. Another family’s computer crashed and couldn’t be restarted.
We were lucky, only losing the modem.
The new modem is about 1/4 the size of the old one, which we had had for quite a few years.
It’s nice being back on line — although I was able the check some things while on break at work. There is certainly a sense of something missing when you can just go to the computer and access the internet.
I wonder what it would be like just to go without it cold-turkey for a couple of weeks or more.
Might have to try that — take a vacation from all things computer related… 
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Another rough day and night for parts of Arkansas.
After nothing but weatherman chatter on the local TV stations, we had tuned the sound out.
Then, at about 7:15 P.M. our home phone started ringing. Less than two seconds after that, my cell phone was ringing — I forgot I had it in my pocket. Then we heard Karen’s cell phone ringing in the living room. Off in the distance the sirens were starting to sound.
When I answered my phone, it turned out to be the head meteorologist from the Little Rock TV station we normally watch. They offer a notification service — for a small annual fee — that will call your phones and send you an e-mail for the storm warnings that you select for your local area. We had selected to be notified for tornado warnings — and that’s what this was.
A storm cell with a possible tornado was heading our way and it was forecast to be here at 7:45.
A full 30 minutes advance warning!
I went and checked to storm shelter. It’s located inside the addition that we’ve been working on forever. We have to go outside to access it, though, as we haven’t got an opening between the house and addition, yet.
The storm shelter is in good shape and, 15 minutes before the storm cell was due, we headed to the that way. We took jackets, our laptops, the portable hard-drives with all of my photos, Karen’s purse, my wallet, our budget book and three flashlights. I had already put a couple of camp chairs down there.
About 7:45, it looked like the cell was going north of us, so I went back in the house to check what they were saying on TV. They showed the cell in our area, with the heaviest part of it to the north, but said that the part right over us was showing rotation, so I headed back to the shelter, where we waited for another ten minutes.
It turns out the cell went about 7 miles north of us and then died almost completely away over the next 30 minutes.
This is the first time that we actually used the shelter. Even though nothing came of it, it is comforting to have it available — just in case.
Especially the way things have been going this year!
I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s news. We already know that Stuttgart, down south and east of Little Rock, was hit and that there are several fatalities from the storm system over in Oklahoma.
I’ve heard more than one person say that they ready for the hot, stagnant days of summer — something that few around here really look forward to.
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I made it out of the house yesterday for the first time in almost a week. We went into town, but I still wasn’t feeling the greatest.
I guess what I thought was a cold turned out to be the flu strain that’s been going around. Since I didn’t go to the doctor, I don’t know for sure. I was planning to go yesterday if I wasn’t significantly better.
Ran a fever for several days and was pretty much out of it round the clock. Slept a lot. Not much coughing, which is funny, because the main thing I’m left with now is a cough.
Haven’t looked at much online until yesterday.
We’ve lost power at least three times today. The generator is sitting ready just in case.
According to the National Weather Service, we’ve had somewhere between 2.5 to 4 inches of rain today and our county is in a flash flood warning. Fortunately, we live on top of a ridge so don’t have a problem with flooding. There’s still a lot more rain to come, I think.
With being sick and all of this rain, it’s hard to get some of the stuff done outside that I wanted to do during this time off.
I go back to work three weeks from today and the contract job will go until the end of August.
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I’ve finally succumbed to a cold — first one this season of any consequence.
The good news is that I won’t be passing it on to anyone at work because I’m not at work — for now.
I was hired as a contractor to work through the first week of March. Then the students went to the plant to support the other unit’s refueling outage. I’ll go back to work about the 8th or 9th of April — the week before classes pick up again. My last day was supposed to be Friday, but that turned into a snow day.
The snow is all gone. Living about 500 feet above the river valley, when we have frozen precipitation, we generally get a bit more than many of the surrounding areas and it usually lasts a little longer. But, still, it’s Arkansas and March, so the snow didn’t stay around long.
I’ve taken about a 5 day break from reading e-mail and looking at blogs… I’ll get back to it. Just taking a bit of a break.
During the last couple of weeks, I’ve been looking at, and downloading, a lot of images associated with the Depression years and the dust bowl. I read a book called “The Worst Hard Time” and found a copy of the old Government propaganda documentary “The Plow that Broke the Plains.” With all of that as a starting point, I picked up a copy of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
I read quite a bit — and I used to read a whole lot more — but I’ve never been one to get into the great classics of literature. This time, though, having spent some time getting to know the background, this book is an easy and interesting read. I’ve never tried to read it before, that I know of, and I think I would know since the protagonist’s last name, Joad, is so close to mine. (Did I really just use the word protagonist?)
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