I feel like posting on my blog. I have totally exhausted the weather (maybe it's exhausted me), my garden (it's doing great). and Hubby hasn't done anything noteworthy since getting lost.. He's mowing the lawn right now. That keeps him out of trouble, and fills my home with the fresh scent of newly mown grass. You have to love that.

I was snooping through my photobucket gallery and I found a picture that reminded me that I did have something worth sharing after all.



For some people, Batman fills the bill, for others Johnny Depp as Captain Jack does it. When we think of heroes do we always think of the super powered cartoon characters, or is there someone...just an ordinary person that fills the bill for you?

When I do my client, it's usually during the 11am to 1pm hours. On the days that I'm there she gets Meals-On-Wheels. The driver, David, is a middle to late 30's young man who works on a farm and in his "spare" time delivers meals and does odd jobs for my client. He has proved to be invaluable to my client and is one of the reasons that at 85 she is able to keep the outside of her home looking as good as I keep the inside. He's a hard worker, and my client is not the only one he does the odd job for, although he is most consistently called by my client.

The town of Lee Center experienced a microburst storm at 5 am Wednesday morning. The winds were so strong that it uprooted trees and moved them to other areas. Houses and garages were damaged, wires were down and many of the roads were impassable. David has MOW clients he needs to deliver to on the roads that were closed Wednesday. He delivered to EVERY one of his elderly people.

The fire department told him he shouldn't be in certain areas and he went anyway. Yes, it was a foolhardy action. It was something he could have regretted. Assuming he survived. His motivation was the knowledge that for some of these people the meal he delivers is the only decent meal of the day.

In our county, if it's snowing too hard in the winter the entire program stops for the day. No one that actually works for this program would have said a thing to him if he chose not to make those deliveries. He's a volunteer, they pay him nothing but mileage to do this. This is not something he does for profit, this is something he does from his heart. I don't know his last name, but David is my hero. Waist length hair and all.

Dividers @ Bopmyspace.com

There really were angels watching over the village of Lee Center on Wednesday. These are pictures of the storm damage I found on our local news channel website.







This gives some idea of the scope of the storm and what David went through to deliver his meals to these people.

I received a phone call from Hubby shortly after 2 this afternoon. He didn't sound like a very happy camper so I asked him what was wrong. "I'm tired of driving, I'm on my way home" he said. I knew that the last pump out he had was quite a distance out, so I asked if he found the place all right. It seems he had and he had completed the job there. The problem arose when he left the job to come home. He got lost.

His Mio Map GPS system seems to have had a fatal error, or at least that was what it said on the screen. Try as he might he couldn't get it to work so he asked the customer for directions. She told him to take a right at the corner and then when he came to the crossroad take another right. He says that's what he did and he wound up heading in the wrong direction with no idea that he was going the wrong way. He's all ready out of our area by a good 35 miles, and the direction he took added another 50 miles. He finally found a road that he was familiar with and drove back on that one.

When he arrived at home he asked to see my atlas and proceeded to show me the area where he did the pump out and the area where he finally found a familiar road. I've studied that map carefully trying to figure out how he wound up where he did. There is only one conclusion that can be arrived at. Based on what the map says and my tracing the route he drove on, he turned left instead of right. Discretion being the better part of valor, I'm not telling him that. My lips are sealed.

Of course, my laughter has rung out numerous times since he came home. He just laughs with me while telling me it's not funny. Of course he doesn't realize that I'm not laughing at his getting lost I'm laughing because he seems to have lost the ability to tell his left from his right.

Part of the problem is his reliance on the GPS system. When someone or something is guiding you, no attention is paid to where you actually are. Had he paid attention to the landmarks as a driver without this guidance does, he wouldn't have gotten lost.  Since he followed the GPS system and turned without reading the road signs where it said to turn, he had no way of knowing he was going the wrong way when he left the customers home. Technology is wonderful, when it works, but it shouldn't replace the use of the human brain.

He is so used to using this technology that he owns two of these portable GPS systems. One for each of his vehicles. So, now he's down to one and hopefully it will get him there and back again when he needs to go someplace. If it doesn't at least I'll have something more to laugh about.

My apologies for having left last night's party early, I had no choice. Shortly before 9:30 we got hit with a lot of lightening and thunder. Oddly, it didn't rain. The first flash of lightening caused a dimming of my lights so I found it necessary to shut down and wait it out.

The power stayed on but there were many many strikes of lightening. Mother Nature's fireworks were pretty awesome and lasted well over an hour. They also did some visible damage.

I had to go into the city this morning for milk. As I enter the city I drive by a bowling alley. A power line to a tranformer was knocked down and it left a 3 foot wide swath of totally burned out vegetation from the curb to the building itself. The powerline landed on an attached storage shed. There didn't seem to have been a fire, it just looks as if a tree limb hit it but no tree limb could have. I didn't notice any burned edges, which surprises me, just a crease which cleaves the upper third of the building in two.

The vegetation in the area between the curb and building was quite high and on one side you can see the singeing of the upper leaves. The area isn't black exactly, it looks as if someone cut into it and then removed the vegetation exposing the underlying soil. I imagine the power company cleaned it out in order to work in that area as the power line has been lifted but it isn't up as high as it was.

I don't believe this had anything to do with the dimming of my lights as this occured just over 4 miles away from me and the transformer involved isn't on the trunk line that heads in my direction. The dimming of my lights more than likely occured when a tree limb fell onto the wires along the road to my house. Odd that I didn't hear the fire siren. If my windows are open I can hear it every day at noon, but not when there was an obvious emergency. It would be very unlikely that the fire department didn't respond as this particular tree limb caught fire.

According to our local weather report we will be treated to more thunder and lightening throughout the next three days. It will be sometime on Tuesday before this system leaves the area. Which means that it will be sometime on Tuesday before I get a reliable internet connection again. In the meantime my visits will be hit and miss which is fine as I have much to occupy me while I'm waiting. It might just take me that long to dry out the drivers seat of my car.

I'm not a big fan of blue grass music but when John the Squabbler told me HE left his car window open and now has a Soggy Bottom I just couldn't resist it.



The car seat is resisting the drying out process because I can't leave the window open long enough. I don't have a soggy bottom because I used a sheet of plastic on the car seat.

The updated weather report calls for rain through Thursday so I guess the three of us will have Soggy Bottoms until then.

Some Guys Have All The Luck



Luck can be a fleeting commodity. Hubby almost ran out of his quota today. It was going to rain and I was preparing to go outside to roll up the windows in the car when he said to never mind he was going to Tractor Supply so he'd do it. It started raining just as he pulled out and I saw him driving away with the window open. He wasn't gone but 10 minutes when it started coming down pretty good. It never occured to me that he wouldn't close the car window.

When he got home he asked for dry clothes. I thougth it was because he got soaked between the car and the store or vice versa. No he tells me, the car must have a hole in the roof. He says he stayed in the store a long time because it was raining so hard and when he came out he found the seat, steering wheel and the inside of the door all wet. Guess who forgot to close the window?

He's alive. I suppose that one of these days I'll really lose my temper with him over things like this, but not today. I won't need to use the car until tomorrow and by then it will be dryer, I hope.

Infatuation

I have been watching a program on the History Channel called Gangland. It's about the various street gangs that inhabit our prison system and the streets of our cities and towns. Now I live in a fairly rural area but if you travel 10 miles in 2 directions from my home you will encounter 2 medium security prisons and 1 maximum security prison. As a matter of fact, Son of Sam was housed for a time at the one that is now closest to where I live.

I see by our paper that gang activity has encroached into the two cities of any size that are neighbors of the town I live in. There is an increase in drug related crimes. I can't say that there's an increase in drugs so much, because I believe that those have been fairly common here since the 1960's. The crimes that revolve around them have escalated somewhat. There does seem to be more fights, knifings, shootings and the rate of murder in our area is up somewhat. I'm not really sure of that part though, it may be that the victims and perpetrators have changed. Prior to now most of the murders have been committed by family or during the course of incidents of spousal abuse. Now it seems that some of them are drive by shootings and knifings that appear to be gang related.

We've never been a crime free area by any means. We had the usual amount of DWI's, drive by annihilations of ones mailboxes by baseball bats, and quite a few good ole boys rumbling at the local bar on a Saturday night. We did have a small gang of 15 year olds that were breaking and entering and of course, stealing small things from our homes. When cocaine was the drug of choice during the 80's there were quite a few high powered dealers being arrested with large caches of weaponry, however they were mostly for the dealer to protect their stock and I know of no one who died because of them.

During the course of a day, I have contact with quite a few people, largely because of my husbands business and my own employment with a home care company. Only twice since 1987 have we been involved with any investigations into criminal activity in our area. Once was because while pumping a septic tank my husband witnessed a home owners Pitbull attack a neighbors dog. The homeowner couldn't get his dog to let go of the smaller one so he shot it. Hubby was questioned by the State Police because the homeowner in question was a suspected drug dealer that they couldn't get anything concrete on. They were looking for a weapons charge against him. Hubby couldn't provide a description of the weapon because he was running towards the truck away from the Pit bull. Hey, you never know with Pitbulls.

The second time we were involved with an investigation was because some neighbor boys broke into Hubby's work van and stole all of his tools. We were the victims of that and I have to tell you it wasn't the nicest thing I've ever had happen to us, however the kids that did it panicked when we seemed to be able to figure out who did it and they dumped all of his tools into the Erie Canal. Gone, but they were caught anyways, and prosecuted. One of the young men had an attack of conscience and confessed. Not what I'd call hardened criminals.

Neither Hubby nor I were street smart, it never occured to either of us that his cleaning out the van and rearranging his tools on a Sunday afternoon would cause us to have a problem like that. All those power tools were too big a temptation for a couple of kids in their late teens who were looking for a way to get money for a party. If they hadn't seen the tools, they might not have robbed him. It was a case of our own behavior that caused us so much trouble. We make choices in life and sometimes we don't see or understand the consequences of our choices. In this case, if they hadn't seen the tools, we'd still have them. We're a lot more careful now than we were then.

We grew up with parents that taught us to respect other peoples property and to stay away from the criminals of the world who don't. We aren't the kind of people who feel it's all right to take from others. We earn what we have. We have never purchased a second hand item from someone just because they were selling it cheap so we've never been involved in receiving stolen goods. We've never used drugs so it wasn't ever necessary for us to associate with a drug dealer and this behavior has kept us from being involved in any kind of criminal activity. We raised Hubby's kids to feel the same way. My grandchildren are now being raised with the same morality and they have steered clear of any gang activity that might occur in their schools.

Gangs may be putting their roots down in our area, but I can't say that I know any of them. I don't know who belongs to them or what the names of them are. They appear to be largely black and hispanic according to the rogues gallery that appear in the daily rag that passes itself off as a newspaper in my area. I feel sorry for the folks who find themselves the victims of certain types of gang related activity, but in some ways I suspect they invite it in by their own behavior.

We may at some point find ourselves being robbed again, but I'm very sure we will never be treated to a home invasion by gang members looking to kill any of my family or friends. We don't encourage that kind of behavior. We don't harbor criminals and we don't feel sorry for those who find themselves in trouble because they do. I was taught to choose my friends wisely because as my Mom and Grandmother always said. "When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas." Why would anybody make any other kind of choice?