Time to take a break from anti-war rants and blog about what's going on at home...

Last week Earthlink ran seven additional automatic bank drafts (for other subscribers) through my bank account, causing a major headache in terms of money they took out of my account and subsequent overdraft fees. The bank and Earthlink worked to resolve this issue and the charges were reversed. The same thing has happened again this week. Again. Sigh. Fortunately, this time I was prepared, and not trying to pay a major bill before the cut-off date. Yesterday when I got the overdraft notices in the mail, I calmly opened them, looked at the clock, realised it was too late to do anything about it that day, and put them aside for later. This morning I contacted the representative at my bank who'd been so helpful last week. Turns out someone had caught at least part of the error and refunded about $85 to my account, and she'll get the rest taken care of. In the meantime, we have put a stop onto automatic drafts from Earthlink. After next week's payday we'll probably close down my bank account and open another one just to be on the safe side. I've never had this such a ludicrous problem with automatic bank drafts before. If you're an Earthlink subscriber, you may want to check your bank or credit card statements to see if you're having any problems. My attempts to contact the company and tell the of the problem resulted in canned replies. It's a shame--I've had good service from them in the past. But frankly between the problems I had and the ones the bank had in sorting out what I happened, I went ahead and closed my Earthlink account today, even though I could have gone for monthly-send-in-a-cheque-billing. It's just not worth this amount of trouble. I'll probably go through one of the local providers eventually.

The weather here in Lexington has been beautiful this week--up in the 70s, sunny, with trees budding and grass nearly jumping inches before your eyes. This weekend it's supposed to turn cold (which figures, since we're scheduled for the Heart Walk), but hopefully we won't lose the flower buds.

To followup to the main blogging subject of February, namely Lexington's ice storm, we did have two more casualties. Two men were electrocuted the other day while working on a damaged tree. The wind may have blown their ladder into a powerline nearby. With so many limbs down or threatening to come down, people have been scrambling with the good weather to get what they can cleaned up. The city has been picking up trash in the first part of the week and tree limbs in the second, and the cleanup is far from over. Our apartments have limbs stacked up higher than me all along our right of way. A lot of trees still need to be trimmed or cut down. It's amazing how many are trying to bud out or flower even as they hang by a thread. The same day the men were killed a big limb that remained in my backyard came on down. I'm surprised they hadn't gone ahead and taken it when they cleaned up the rest--they'd trimmed it. But I guess they were hoping that one might recover. So a couple of people are partially blocked at their patios. Our apartments did go ahead and plant twelve street trees right after the storm.

I have my own trees growing in my office. A coworker had one of the flower arrangements that are sometimes donated by funerals (yes, a little creepy, but...) and these twigs had rooted in the florist's foam. So we put them in a big pot I have in front of my window. They now have sprouts several inches long on them. We think it's corkscrew willow, which would explain how well it grows.

Well, that's all I have for now. Hope your day is going well.