There's something to be said about big troubles coming in great gobs all at once.

First, my grandfather-in-law died late last week. :( They think it was an aneurysm. He was 93.

The next day, our house got burgled. Thieves made off with the electronic equipment like the TV, other stereo equipment, my husband's computer setup and his CD collection. Curious, why do they take heavily worn used CD's? Anyway, we do have house insurance although I don't know exactly how it works.

That same night my ISP connection died completely due to someone hardcoding on our bandwidth... by coincidence at the time RinkWorks also went down...

All that was just this weekend. Heh, I can add that to the list of woes from last year: 2 national disasters, namely the Great Ice Storm of '98 (no one had electricity or hot water for 3 weeks in the middle of January), then 3 months later, the Great Flood (I went to work and found my lab under 2.5 feet of water, including all my research notes and lab samples gone heavily rusted), and later on that summer, one of my co-workers had a local twister go through his apple orchard, although he didn't know what it was at the time -- it's not like we expect tornadoes this far north!

We joke that we're now waiting for the plague of locusts and the boils and sores to appear. If you're detecting a note of resentment there, it was not meant to be intentional. AS the paradoxical Chinese adage goes, May you live in interesting times; and taste all the sweet and the bitter that goes with it. So we are having interesting times indeed...