BACK! And hoping it sticks...

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all. ~William Faulkner

Many thanks to Judy for keeping y'all updated (and I laughed when I saw her YouTube videos!). Our power came back on about 30 minutes ago and I'm hoping it stays on! We had about 4 - 5" of heavy, wet snow last night and are expecting more snow today and tomorrow and maybe even Monday, so I know it's tough for the power guys out there. I'm so appreciative of all their hard work.

The damage here was pretty astounding -- LOTS of really huge trees down, and branches and debris everywhere. It looked like a tornado had hit. We had power lines down in the road with trees on top of them on both major roads out of my neighborhood.

I'm just glad I can flush my toilet without having to retrieve buckets of water from the creek 150 yards out back!!

In any case, I'm back (and hoping to stay that way) but have to get working on LASR/WC stuff in the worst way, so will sign off for now. Thanks to all for your positive thoughts and comments. They were all greatly appreciated. I'm obviously far behind on blogs and touching base, and will try to catch up as soon as I can.

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