...And into the other frying pan.

This is just a quick blog to say to everyone: if you're trying to reach me, you'll have to use my cellular digits rather than my cyber home for the next couple of days. Lightning struck my house on Saturday and totally knocked out my phone and fried my dsl modem.

So to catch everyone up:

(1) First, my air conditioner died and I was living in sweltering heat for 5 days and almost died of heat stroke.

(2) Then the day after the ac was fixed, my water heater gave up the ghost and flooded my laundry room... luckily not spreading all the way into my office where my computers would have been totalled. I had to go not only without hot water, but also without ANY water to my house for about 4 days, because for some reason the heater kept filling up through its output pipe (no shut off valve on that one) and pouring more and more water into my poor laundry room, which now smells like a swamp. No water to the house means no showers, no toilets, no nothing.

(3) That's all fixed now (fingers crossed), but on Saturday late-afternoon that thunderstorm rolled in and... well... I've already covered that.

If anyone is wondering what I've done to prevent further disasters from happening at home, I'll tell you what I did... and I don't care if you give me shit about me being "superstitious" or whatever: I smudged the house with burning sage... a whole freakin' bundle of sage, actually. Although I'd been thinking about it for some time, I hadn't actually smudged in 3 years and I started thinking, "Maybe it's like spraying for bugs and you're supposed to do it once a year? Or like oil changes every 3 months?" Anyway, I did. It was good enough for my Chippewa ancestors, so it's good enough for me. If you want to make fun of me, feel free! I've been wanting to try my hand at some voodoo dolls next.

So anyhow, until I'm back up to full throttle again, if you've got my cell number, please feel free to use it. My phone hardly ever rings anyway, so I've got plenty of free minutes. I can only check my email briefly from my mother's computer for now, until the phone company comes out to fix the lines... then I'll be relegated to dial-up for a bit, until the replacement dsl modem arrives some time next week.

What a fun couple of weeks! It's been kinda like camping... only suckier.