At the office I have this eraser, it's pretty big, and it says "For Big Mistakes" on it.  I was given it shortly have starting my new job at Marshall after I had accidentally dropped the wrong database in a migration process.  We had a backup so it wasn't that big of a mistake but it was funny and so John dropped the eraser off on my desk.  It's mine until someone else does a boneheaded thing.

This morning I decided to clean up my desk as it was getting a little cluttered.  I wasn't sure what to do with the eraser but I knew I wanted to keep it visible but because it is funny and becuase it is a good reminder for me to slow down and show a little more care at times.   I have a shelf off to my left that displays a few things and I thought, "Oh, I'll just lean it up against something on there" and I picked up the eraser and leaned it against the first thing I saw that it was sufficiently smaller than so that the eraser wouldn't block out my view of the supporting item. 

I took a step back to see how it looked and realized I had just made a big mistake.  The eraser was leaning up against a framed wedding portrait from our big day.  Clearly having "For Big Mistakes" labeling your own wedding picture is a bad idea.  It only sat there for a second before I shifted it over to cover the spines of a few books on the opposite end of the shelf.

I'm glad I caught it; I certainly don't consider my marriage to be a mistake and I'd hate for it to have been sitting like that when Lisa visited the office.

I recently switched jobs and, in so doing, I also switched from using a Windows PC to a Mac (OS X Lion).  I didn't have many reasons for switching beyond curiosity and what I perceived to be a more flexible development environment.  My curiosity has been satisfied but, so far, I have not had the opportunity to really appreciate any increased flexibility in my development tasks.

The Bad

There are some things about the Mac that, quite frankly, I detest.  I doubt if I'll remember them all.  To many readers they may seem trivial but, to me, each of these are serious problems that I wish I could address.  Thus, if you are a Mac user and you know how I can fix these annoyances please let me know!

A lot of these boil down to the fact that Apple just doesn't seem to like the keyboard and I obviously have a preference for using the keyboard to get things done.  I can't imagine I'm the only developer with this issue.  Maybe I'm the only one who hasn't figured out the secret to having a harmonious relationship with the mac and a keyboard.

I've tried using the keyboard shortcut editor in system prefences but overall it really doesn't fit my needs and, it doesn't seem like I can override preset shortcuts in an app.  If anyone can help me make the mac more keyboard friendly I would love to hear your advice and suggestions!

The Good

I don't only have gripes; in fact there are somethings that I've thought are great about my Mac experience.  They just aren't all software things:

That's it at the moment.  I'm certain there have been other things that have been bothering me and other things I've really liked - but I think this sums it up pretty well.  I don't regret the change in general though my right forearm has been much worse for wear due to the constant need to use the mouse (carpel tunnel doesn't seem to bother me when I type).

Do you have any tips or tricks that might make it easier for me to adopt to the mac-way?

 

 

 

I'm not sure why but my wife decided it was time to remodel my eldest daughters bedroom.  Previously it was a sky blue and, I guess, kind of boring, so this time the two of them got together and came up with a color scheme that can be described as anything but boring.  There are four walls so there are four colors; green, yellow, blue, and fuscia - plus there are painted on chalkboards scattered throughout the room.

They also decided to go with black furniture, an orange couch, and a different green bookshelf plus a bight yellow throw rug and a royal blue papasan chair.  Needless to say I was skeptical of all of these colors working out together.  I'll say it now, before you read any further, I was wrong.  It looks pretty good.

 

As you can see we built a loft bed and slide the couch and papasan chair under it. All of the furniture in the room, with the exception of the blue chair, came from IKEA. This was my first real experience with IKEA and, for the most part, it was good. The directions weren't as crazy as I had been led to believe and assembly went pretty smoothly with one minor exception. That's where the Dremmel comes in.

We built a few different "cubbie" cubes.  The one beside the desk is a 4x4 configuration while there are three separate 2x4 setups.  Two of the 2x4s act as the base for the guinea pig cages.  We had assembled the 4x4, the bed, and one of the 2x4 sets on Sunday.  Last night when I got home from work I decided I'd try to finish the last 2x4s before the rest of the family got home.  It seemed simple enough but I managed to start off poorly right away by attaching a base piece to a side with the base piece backwards.  When I tried to remove the two bolts that held them together I noticed I had stripped out the hex socket on the bolt.  I couldn't remove it.

I tried to use put a rubber band over the tip of the allen wrench but the rubber band was too thick.  I tried to drill into the bolt but all that did was put a hole in the bolt.  Finally I saw a suggestion online to use a dremmel to cut a notch out of the head that you can use a flat tip screw driver with.  Fortunately I bought a dremmel last year - unfortunately our garage is a nightmare and I had a lot of trouble finding the dremmel.  After about 20 minutes of digging and climbing I located it and boy did it work.  Sparks flew, metal shavings poured out, and a perfectly useful notch appeared in the head of the bolt.  Seconds later and I had removed the bolt, flipped the panel, and screwed the bolt back in. 

After that was fixed ther rest of the construction was smooth sailing.  Plus, once Lisa got home we finished the desk and moved out the last of the old furniture (with the exception of an old chest that still needs to find a home elsewhere in the house).

Shannon loves her room and I don't blame her.  While the colors aren't my preferred choice I'd live in her room if I were single.  It's pretty sweet.  I still need to take a photo of the corner with the green bookcase but even it looks pretty good.

Overall the process of moving from a self-hosted wordpress installation to a posterous blog isn't too tricky.  The setup of the blog on Posterous is really easy and I won't get into that here.  There is, however, one area where I ran into some problems - exporting and importing my blog from wordpress into Posterous.

Posterous has a tool for importing wordpress export files and it mostly works without trouble.  However, there is one caveat - the file can't be too big.  I'm not sure size in terms of Megabytes is the issue but rather size in terms of post count.  I am not sure what the max size is that will work without fail but if your import fails in anyway try to re-export into smaller time period chunks.

For instance my blog has been around since April of 2003.  During that time I've written about 1300 blog posts.  Needless to say the importer couldn't handle that much.

I tried to cut the export down into year increments with the exception of my first one, Apr 03 - Aug 05 but it failed as well.  It actually looked like it was going to work but it got stuck on the 252 post.

On other imports, such as my Nov 08 - Mar 09 section (I had cut down to half year increments at this point) the upload portion of the import would fail.  In the status bar of my browser the upload would get to about 87% and then just hang there.  For other larger post count periods the upload would complete but the next page would never load and I'd get a timeout error.

I'm missing some posts in the move (less than 100).  However, the interface for browsing my posts in the admin panel on Posterous kind of falls apart when you have as many as I do so it isn't worth the effort for me to discover which ones are missing.

Another thing to note - Posterous says they will send you an email when the import is complete.  That isn't true.  I ended up doing around 20 different import files and I didn't receive a single email.

Finally, there is no collision detection.  That means if you import the same set of posts more than once - you'll get duplicate posts after you merge the imports into your blog.  Thus it is in your best interest to make sure you don't overlap your export files.

If you screw up just create a new space and make that new space your primary - then you can delete the old space and start again.

Last night I had a very disturbing dream. Maybe the saddest dream I've ever had. It woke me up and I couldn't let it go. In fact it occupied my thoughts until I finally just wrote it down. I tried to tell some others about the dream this morning but it didn't help, it was hard to vocalize and I my retelling was pretty spotty.

The characters in the story aren't really meant to reflect anyone I know in real life; the only person in the story that isn't fictional is me.  The rest of the people in the dream didn't even look like people I know.  Anyway, without further ado here is the story.

---

I was eleven when my little sister was born.  She came early.  I don’t know how early but it scared everyone when my step-mom Barb went into labor.  Her parents drove down from Toronto as soon as they heard she was in labor.  My dad has always hated doctors and hospitals, he wouldn’t even go into the sonogram appointments, because he associates doctors with death - but he was scared too.  He was so scared he didn’t just go into the hospital he went into the labor and delivery room with Barb and left me and my brothers out in the waiting room.

Labor didn’t take too long.  Something else went wrong so they had to do an emergency C-Section so my grandparents showed up after Abby was born.  None of us could see Abby yet, or Barb for that matter.  Abby had to go to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) while Barb just had to recover.  Fortunately she was OK and supposedly so was Abby.  Dad looked super tired but he seemed happy and stunned all at the same time.  When grandma and grandpa showed up dad had them take us home so that Barb could rest.  I think it was so he could too - he looked real tired.It was about eight weeks later that Abby was big enough to come home from the hospital.  She was still so tiny I couldn’t believe she was alive.  She as kind of ugly too.   I know everyone always says babies are beautiful but Abby was the first one I’d seen up close and she was ugly. She had a tight little face that was fuzzy and pudgy marked with a darker reddish blue birthmark across her left cheek.  Her eyes were a dull black that didn’t seem to register anything.  She was just there; a little lump.  She didn’t even really cry or smile or anything. She was just there.

Barb on other hand cried all the time.  I didn’t know why at first.  Dad did but he wasn’t really much of a talker and Barb was too upset to explain.  Her parents weren’t much use.  They just tried to make everything sound like it would be okay even though it was clear, even to my youngest brother Toby, who was five, that everything wasn’t going to be okay.  Our grandparents left after a couple weeks of having Abby home and surprisingly things got even worse around the house without their annoying sugary optimism.Barb kept on crying and she seemed to get angry.  Abby just laid there like a lump eating her formula and pooping.  Dad went back to work and pretended like everything was normal.  School was getting ready to start but I wasn’t even excited about buying my new clothes for the year.  I was starting seven grade, my first year of Junior High, but I wasn’t scared or excited at all; at least not about school.  I was scared about Abby and Barb.  I tried to talk to Barb but she just yelled at me and when I tried to touch Abby Barb yelled even more and told me I could never, NEVER, touch Abby.I never really got along with Barb but I was still scared for her.  She was losing a lot of weight and her eyes were really sunken and raw from all the crying.  I didn’t think it was possible for someone to cry that much.  Well, I had thought a baby might but not Abby.  In fact, except for the pooping and smell that went along with it I could have forgotten that Abby was around.  She was so quiet and I couldn’t touch her she started to fade from my thoughts up until the Doctors started to come around.Doctors hadn’t made house calls in forever I thought.  But we had a steady stream of them pouring into the house looking at Abby.  They would poke her ever so gently and peel back her eyelids. They’d pry her mouth open and touch the roof of her mouth with feather soft care.  Then they’d slowly and careful bend her arms and legs.  It was kind of funny to watch them bent over Abby with their stethoscopes on her chest while they carefully moved her arms back and forth - they looked like safe-crackers from the movies trying to discover the correct combination. After about a week of the doctors we had a family meeting.Some doctor was at the meeting too and, after Dad introduced her, she stood up and told us Abby had a rare but deadly disease.  She said it was sort of like brittle bone syndrome.  Abby could break really easy and so we had to make sure to always be really careful around her.  That wasn’t all though; she also had some kind of mental retardation.  I don’t know what disease the doctor said but it supposedly explained why Abby was so quiet.  I cried for a while that night before I fell asleep - sad for Abby - but my Dad came in and told me to toughen up so I stopped.The next day Barb brought a little doll out into the living room and told us that from then on if one of us felt an urge to hold Abby we should just hold the doll instead.  The doll was just about the same size as Abby but it didn’t look anything like her.  My little brothers liked to hold it though and they would call it Abby all the time.  It was pretty weird.  They would hold the doll while standing near the crib and talk to Abby.  I tried it a couple times when everyone else was asleep but it didn’t feel right.  I wanted to hold Abby but I was afraid to try and pick her up - I didn’t want to break her.As the months went by and Abby grew Barb would replace the doll with one that was the same size as Abby.  Eventually Abby started to make some sounds; little coos and gasps, but nothing intelligible and she still never cried.  I started to think that maybe she didn’t cry because she was too sad and that if she started to cry that she would just disappear as the sorrow left her body.  She never got to be held by her mom or dad.  Nobody ever even touched her except when Barb changed her diaper and occasionally when she rolled her over so that Abby wouldn’t get sores.Every time I looked at Abby I got sad.  I felt like her sadness was leaking into me.  I wanted so badly to help her, to make her smile, or at least feel alive but I couldn’t do anything.  Her eyes were always so dark and lifeless when I looked at her.  She’d look back but it was without recognition.  I could have been a potted plant I think.  It just wasn’t right.  When my brothers were born I got to hold them and play with them and I loved them so much.  But Abby was just this little china doll that I couldn’t do anything with.  How was I supposed to love her?On Abby’s first birthday we didn’t have a party.  Instead Barb told us that Abby was going to have to move to a special care facility and that she wouldn’t be living with us anymore.  My brothers got really sad and started to cry but I remembered my dad telling me to be tough so I held in it.  I was twelve now and almost a teenager.  I had to be a man.  Barb then brought out a new iPad that had this little app on it that let us see Abby whenever we wanted to.  The special care facility had a camera that would broadcast Abby 24/7.  I had an iPhone so I installed the app on my phone. I called it Abbs.  I’d look in on Abbs all time.  I was so curious about what this “special care†was.  But no matter when I looked she was in the same position in the same bed.  I never saw anyone doing anything for her or taking care of her.  Sometimes she’d be asleep and sometimes her dull black eyes would be looking at the camera but other than that I never really saw any changes.  Even her pajamas always looked the same.  I doubted she was getting any care at all let alone special care.Sometimes I’d see Toby carrying the doll around and talking to it like it was Abby.  He would smile down at the doll or caress it’s face.  Other days I’d see him holding the iPad and he would cuddle up with the Abbs.  Watching Toby or Roger, our other brother, with the doll and the iPad would always make me sadder.   They had perfectly adopted these surrogates as their sister but I couldn’t.  I still just wanted to hold Abby and let her know that she wasn’t alone.  Then I’d look on my phone and see that she was alone and I’d hide somewhere so I could cry for her.One day though things changed on Abbs.  I looked and she was smiling.  It was the first emotion I’d ever seen from her.  It was amazing.  I picked up my phone and hugged it before I realized what I was doing.  I didn’t tell Barb or dad about the smile.  It didn’t last long either.  As soon as I noticed I was hugging my phone I looked again and Abby looked the same as always.  No smile, no anything, just Abby.  I think I loved Abby the whole time - that it was just a natural response to having a sister but until I hugged my phone I hadn’t realized how much I loved her.  I felt like everyone else in the house had just thrown her away and had accepted the surrogates as her.  They didn’t seem to actually miss Abby; they had their doll.   I’m not sure how Barb felt.  I didn’t really care - at least not after the hug.  Once I realized how much I loved Abby I started to hate Barb.  I hated her for sending Abby away.  I didn’t blame my dad even though I should have blamed him as much as I did Barb.  Instead I just focused all of my energy on hating Barb.Three more years went by with Abby at the special care facility.  My brothers had stopped carrying around the doll and Barb and stopped replacing it with one that was closer to Abby’s size.  I guess it’s tough to get a four year old size doll.  Instead everyone had their own iPad with an Abbs app.  They would each check in on Abby once or twice a day and say something to her but that was about it.  Not me though.  While my friends were typing on facebook or tweeting I’d be checking on Abby.  At dinner when my dad was checking the stock quotes on his phone and my brothers were texting their friends I’d be checking in on Abby.She didn’t smile again.  I started to doubt I had ever seen her smile.  But then one day she cried.  Abby cried.  She was five and she was still wearing the same style of pajama she had worn when she first went to the facility four and a half years earlier but she was crying.  It wasn’t a wailing cry just a small quite cry.  Huge tears were running down her cheeks and her eyes were alive; they were bright and darker than coal.  I cried with her and promised her that I would save her.   Eventually she stopped crying and her eyes dried and returned to their dull lifelessness.  I cried even harder.  Here I was a sixteen year old, a junior in High School, and I couldn’t stop crying.  I felt like such baby.  I’m glad my dad didn’t hear me.Christmas break was fast approaching in school and I decided that I would find Abby and visit her - that she didn’t need to be alone anymore.  I just had to find out where the facility was.  I knew I couldn’t ask my dad so I confronted Barb.  I demanded to know but she refused me.  I yelled and screamed and argued but she all she did was glare at me and silently reject me.  I don’t know what happened to me but I grabbed her then.  I grabbed Barb by the throat and demanded she tell me where Abby was.  I promised her that if she didn’t tell me that I’d choke her till she died.  She barely seemed to care but she finally told me where Abby was then waved me away.  She never even told my dad what I did.  I hated her even more.I had gotten my drivers license back in May on my sixteenth birthday so I grabbed Barb’s keys and roared out of the driveway in her Ford Escape.  I didn’t really know how to get to the facility but I told my phone the address and it routed the path for me.  Seven and a half hours away.  Not too bad but still surprising that Abby was so far away all these years. I was so angry at Barb for trying to keep me from Abby but I couldn’t bring myself to speed.  I was paralyzed with fear about what would happen when I got to her.During the drive up to the facility I imagined our reunion in a million different ways; like someone who just bought a lottery ticket planning on how to spend their future winnings.  None of them prepared me for what happened.  I never should have gone.When I arrived the place was a nothing more than a house.  It was a big house, victorian in style, with white paint and lacy trim around the edges.  It was idyllic.  I knocked on the front door and a matronly old nurse greeted me warmly and when I identified myself she smiled a sad hesitant smile and led me into a warm living room cum office.  She warned me that Abby would most likely not be responsive and that, even though I’d been using the App so much that I’d be surprised by the changes in her.  After I signed in and promised to be extremely gentle with her the nurse brought me upstairs into a small room full of soft toys, soft furniture, and corners that had all been padded.  The entire room was like a pillow.I didn’t have to wait for long until Abby was brought into the room to meet me.  She could walk.  It was amazing to see her moving.  Why hadn’t I seen her missing from the camera in the app if she could move?  It didn’t make sense but here she was walking into the room.  She glanced past me with her dead black eyes and then picked up a pillowy toy bird and wandered over to the corner of the room.  The nurse silently backed out and told me to take me time.I tried not to start crying after the nurse left but I guess I just wasn’t tough enough.  The tears started to run as I walked over to Abby so slowly I wasn’t even sure I was moving.  I carefully reached out my hand and let my index finger stroke her hand.  She looked back up at me then so I kneeled down beside her and introduced myself, “I’m your brother Bill†I said.  Instantly her eyes lit up, her face rotated into a smile and she breathlessly exhaled “Billy!† The breath was knocked out of me   I was stunned and speechless.  Abby looked at me and cocked her head to the side expectantly.  I tried to say something else, anything, but I couldn’t.  I was crying and I wanted to hug her but I was afraid I’d break her again and just as quickly as her eyes lit up they went dull again.  She stopped looking at me and gazed down at the bird toy.  I started to talk again rapidly, “No, wait Abby, I’m here for you, don’t leave me....†but it didn’t matter. She didn’t look up again.  I said my name again, I said hers I sang her songs I said everything I could think of and I told her how much I loved her but it didn’t matter.  Her eyes remained lifeless and downcast.  She had forgotten me that quickly.  I was devastated.  I had lost my chance because I was crying.I touched her hand once more but she didn’t register the contact and then I said goodbye and left the room.  I didn’t hate Barb anymore I mourned her.  I hated myself and that night at dinner I tweeted about the pot roast.

I'm going to leave this blog here but, at least for the forseeable future, I'm not going to post on it. Instead I'll be posting to Google+. I've put each of the people who currently receive an email notification when the blog is updated (about 30 of you) and put you in a "circle" there. Thus, when I post a blog post there you'll still get an email notice about it. However, you might have to create a google+ account to read it. I'm not sure. Anyway, I find myself posting here less and less frequently but I routinely post on Google+ and so I've decided to try and consolidate my efforts. Hopefully I won't end up regretting this decision :O) I'll be leaving this blog intact so that it can be referenced and because there are a bunch of posts on here that journal cool moments in my life that I don't want to lose access to. Hopefully I'll see everyone over at Google+!

I recently made the most difficult decision of my adult life; I resigned from my position at Strictly Business (SBCS) in order to accept a position at Marshall University. I have loved working at Strictly. It has been, quite frankly, a fantastic experience and I have been surrounded by a group of wonderful people. It is difficult to leave and I will miss working with my many friends and working for an amazing boss (and friend). My career is now basically a two act play. The first act, with Strictly, encompassed the past 12 years of my life. That's three times longer than I had ever lived anywhere prior to starting at Strictly. While at SBCS I learned an enormous amount and I leave behind some great software developers who all taught me many things during my time there. I also had opportunities I never imagined I would have. I went to Hong Kong, London, New Orleans and celebrated the Saints winning the super bowl all while working on some incredibly interesting and oftentimes challenging projects. I can't understate how great Strictly was for, and to, me. Next week I will relax and enjoy the intermission before I start the second act doing systems integration at Marshall. I'm fortunate that I already know, and have a friendship with, some of the people I will be working with at Marshall. I look forward to the different types of development I'll get to do including mobile application development that I just never had a chance to tackle at Strictly. I like to think that this move is a natural progression and I am eager to start making a positive impact at Marshall. I'm nervous but excited. I'm happy for this new opportunity but still a little sad at leaving SBCS. It's an exciting time for me.

Huntington WV, like pretty much every other city has it's fair share of problems. One which many others are also dealing with is a budgetary shortfall. However, unlike cities like Los Angeles our's isn't caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. Huntington didn't really feel the bubble swell or burst. Instead, ours is caused by a combination of prior obligations (pensions, insurance, etc) and a collection of people who have not paid their taxes or fees on simply things like the garbage fees. Here in Huntington we are supposed to pay $15/month for garbage collection for each property we own. That really is a great deal. I've lived in plenty of other places where the garbage fee was anywhere from 50-100/month so I have no sympathy for the people who are dodging the reasonable $15 Huntington charges for such an necessary service. The city has never failed to show up and collect my trash, they have always worked to keep the fee as low as possible by working with the least expensive landfills they can find, and I'm happy to see the trash go away. Thus, when the city published a recent list of folks who owe more than $500 in refuse fees and who haven't made any effort to pay in the past year I was a bit disheartened to see that over $4,000,000 is owed the city. Coincidentally the city is about $4 million in debt so it would be awesome if they could somehow collect these past due fees. The PDF is a little difficult to consume however so I decided to plot the points in a Google map using the fantastic free tool BatchGeo. Here is the resultant map; I've embedded it here but if you'd like full screen access you can get that by following this link. [ http://batchgeo.com/map/7a94e5b11085a154a126ff8b3d811143 ] If you know anyone on this list please go ask them why they aren't paying their fair share. Ask them why they think it is OK that they are making you foot their share of the bill. The people who do pay their fees are being faced with an additional one time $100 bill plus an increase of $5/month to our refuse fees to help make up this shortfall. Make the deadbeats and dodgers pay their share. I'm not encouraging violence but I am encouraging accountability. If the city can't convince them to pay maybe a little peer pressure will do the trick.

There is nothing in my life that prepared me for the phone call I received last monday morning. It was from my mother, she was in hysterics, sobbing that she had lost her home due to flooding from Hurricane Irene. My mom lives in the small town of Esperance which is situated near the central most part of New York state. Hurricane's don't happen there or, at least, they didn't so I assumed she was being dramatic and just meant her house had filled with water and that her possessions were ruined. She tried to tell me it was gone - really gone - but I didn't really, truly, believe her; it sounded too far fetched. However, the pain in her voice as she started to vocalize a list of precious items that she had lost brought me to tears and I offered to drop what I was doing and to drive up and see what I could do to help her. If nothing else, I figured, I could be a shoulder to cry on. She moaned out that she wanted me to come up so I dashed down to my bosses office, told him what little I knew, and arranged to take an indeterminate amount of time off work.

I loaded my Jeep and camper with everything I could think I'd need. I packed tools, shovels, bleach, an air compressor, and even more tools. Once loaded Lisa and I took the kids to their sitter's house and we began the long drive. We didn't arrive until Tuesday evening and by then we had a nice large generator loaded in the Jeep as well. Her small street, Priddle Road, greeted us as if nothing had happened there. The first few houses on the hill looked perfect. The man who lives in the third house on the right was on his riding mower trimming his lawn. It all seemed to confirm my suspicions that my mom was exaggerating. Heck, the fact that I was able to get into Esperance itself made me further doubt her as we expected the roads to be flooded or washed out. Everything seemed extremely normal. We were being setup.

At the bottom of the hill, as we took the final curve and approached a canopy of trees the destruction became evident. It took our breath away. We were truly speechless. The road was a twisted mess of asphalt, mud, human filth, and debris. There were no houses in sight. None. Each house that had once stood in my mom's small community had been reduced to a large muddy pothole scattered with cinder blocks. The Schoharie Creek had risen from it's normally safe 1-3 feet of depth to a raging wall of water over 70 feet tall and had totally decimated the street. My moms long meandering hill that separated her from the creek was gone. The creek had redefined it's banks and my mom's plot of land was now mostly creek bed. Everything, every knick knack, every valuable she had ever owned was gone. Her list from the phone call a day before came back to me in a haunted echo, "My fathers china, my mom's little glass bottle that I had painted with her when I was a little girl. The small statue my brother and I had given to her when we were kids that said "Greatest Mom" - each of these items that were so heavily cloaked in memories were lost. I went to my mom, hugged her, and cried with her. Her entire life seemed to have been washed away. It was emotionally devastating.

I can't really explain the destruction. I've posted photos online but even they don't really help to make sense of it. At least, I tell myself, nobody was hurt or lost. The stuff is, after all, just stuff. It is much easier for me to deal with it because I don't have to live it. It was easier for me to reorient myself almost immediately and to help guide my mom and Susan through the following week because I still had a home to return to. I can not imagine the pain they, and their community, are suffering through. It was relatively easy for me to come up with a plan and to help her hire a contractor, contact FEMA, contact her insurance agent, and to take her on errands to get new work clothes, towels, and socks. It was also fairly easy for me to wander around the field of destruction searching for her effects. We found one of her drums, an antique wooden bookcase, and even two of her necklaces. In all I think we found about ten of her photographs. Each of these things will be cleaned up and, as needed, repaired so that she has them in her new, hopefully safer, home.

Her contractor struck us all as a very honest and forthright man. We don't have much choice but to trust him at the moment. My life demanded I return home this week and my mom and Susan are not even close to being normal again. They are lucky to already own a different plot of land a bit higher and further away from the river where they plan on rebuilding. It's a nice sized 4-acre lot that will be perfect for the small home and barn they plan on building. They were also fortunate to have a volunteer fire department that didn't forget their little street and instead warned them to evacuate just hours before the wave came through and scoured the earth of their homes. Thanks to the warning my mom was able to evacuate and take along her donkeys, dog, cat, chicken, and rooster. They are also extremely fortunate to have an amazing collection of friends.

At the top of Priddle Road, just across Burtonsville road, their friend has offered them shelter. Just down Burtonsville road their other friends E and J are stabling the donkey's and sheltering the chickens. E and her sister have also cleared the new home site on the new land so that the builder can start as soon as all of the red tape is cut. The builder, Marty, is eager to begin and seems totally unconcerned with the financial aspects of it. He reminds me of an old time drug store that provides in house credit to it's customers; just in this case on a much larger scale. Marty, along with input from my mom and Susan has designed a nice home that will be perfect for the two of them as they approach retirement. Hopefully, so long as the insurance company doesn't try to stiff them, the home will be paid for in full or nearly so when it is constructed. As overwhelmed as they have been by the events that swept away their home they have been equally overwhelmed by the kindness of their friends and strangers alike. In many ways it has helped to restore their faith in humanity.

It was with a heavy heart that I loaded my Jeep back up and left Esperance. I left on Tuesday of this week. My mom and Susan still had a shell shocked look on their face but, at least, they had begun the slow process of recovery. Schoharie county had even started, on Monday night, to repave Priddle Road. Their were tears in our eyes as I parted but we all I think felt a little bit of hope that things would eventually be alright. Sadly, the weather decided to smack the region in the mouth again. On Thursday Esperance was evacuated again as heavy rains were too much for the already sodden ground and full resovoir to contain and the city (and Priddle Road) all flooded again. The newly laid street was washed away and, for a while, my mom and Susan could not even get back to their temporary home on the farm because the main highway (Route 20) was shut down.

I have created a google map to help highlight the area and to give you a feel for the lay of the land. I have also set-up a page that people can use if they want to donate any money to my mom and Susan as they rebuild their lives.

Many of my families friends have been asking how they can help my mom (Bonnie Fewtrell) and her partner (Susan Iona) - what can they do? At the moment my Mom has nothing and, even if she acquired things, she would have nowhere to put them. Thus there are two ways I think you can help her.

bonnie.fewtrell@gmail.com" />

If she receives money she can't use she will share it with her ex-neighbors. Twenty houses on her street were completely destroyed so there are plenty of people here who need help. My mom is actually pretty lucky. She, Susan, and their animals were all evacuated in advance. Plus, my mom also owns a small plot of land about 1 mile from her old home site that is much higher and nowhere near the Schoharie Creek (which turned into a raging river when she lost her home). Her plan is to build a new, small, house on this other piece of property. The rest of her neighbors either have to leave the community or attempt to rebuild in the flood plain. If you send (or have sent) money via PayPal it may take a few days for her to accept it because she has to go through a bank account verification process with PayPal first.