Hi, all...
Just checking in before my kids take over my computer again for the night. My son is almost constantly using the Internet for his classes during the evening, and my daughter's school has decided that some of the classes will be using the online versions of the text books - found at the publisher's website w/a password - this year, so I at times feel like I've been hijacked!
Oh, well, at least they're using my computer for a good cause...! :wink:
ehBeth...
Thanks for the stats! I think we all feel kind of lost whenever we can't see where the aktbird is.
I love the idea of either Aa or Andrew T doing a thread whenever we reach the # 1 spot at Care2. (danon, you'd be good, too, but your idea is a really special one.)
Stradee...
I didn't get a chance to see your cat avatar, but I did see the beautiful picture of the big "kitty" with the flower that you posted right before everything was lost...It was great!
Just Susan...
I live in a city right between Seattle and Tacoma. The street that I lived on when Mt. St. Helens blew in 1980 ran north and south and although we couldn't see the mountain itself from our vantage point, we could certainly see the plume of ash. Our cars and houses were dusted with it daily for quite a while afterwards.
I have a lot of relatives who live in eastern Washington and they had an enormous amount of ash land on their houses and yards - pretty much everything! My grandmother (the one who just turned 100) lived in Yakima at the time, and for the longest time afterwards, we were knocking ash out of her bushes and finding it in her gardens under her eaves - inches of it! And, what it did to car engines was awful! We've already warned our son not to use his windshield wipers if any of the ash should come our way without first thoroughly rinsing them and the car windows off. The stuff kind of looks like gray pollen but it's got the consistancy of fine but fluffy sandpaper. It's interesting but nasty stuff.
During one of the last large earthquakes up here, the inside walls of our house looked like they were breathing - all of them - (it was like having a really bad trip) and the floor was rolling so bad you couldn't stand up on it. It was absolutely terrifying!
I don't like strong wind storms, either, and we will be moving into that time of year around here usually starts between October and November. We actually get some pretty strong winds around here, although we don't have hurricanes and we only rarely get tornados in Washington...except last year we actually had several small ones in the state. Unusual, but we heard it may be something that will become more common in the future.
Okay...and my other great fear is spiders...'nuf said about those. Yuck!
I'm still keeping you and your family in my thoughts...
