My ISP is here again. They're starting work on fixing the break int he line so I won't need the "band-aid" any more. I guess their priority work in that other town is done. Either way, I'll be back in a few hours. Maybe.

Edit @ 2:43 PM: They finished the repair job and are just filling in the ditch. Things are back up and running.

Phone a DSL died at 11:07 AM on the 15th. Verizon doesn't detect any issues in their network, so a technician has to visit and diagnose the problem locally.

At the same time, some work was done in the ditch across the road to bury some cabling. They were not Verizon employees, so they could be some other group. Maybe they disturbed the old green box that handled the phone service to my home.

I might be the only one affected, I don't have much information to go off of.

Due to the scale of the damage and outsges, plus the incoming storm that might be another wintery one, power for 90% of the affected customers will be restored by Sunday at 11 PM, some will get it back earlier.

I already have reason to believe that the power still won't be back on when I have to go home and the silence and darkness will drive me nuts.

I'll see if I can hit up a library like I used to back in high school... That should help at least a little.

Power was temporarily restored. When it went out again, the power company changed the outage report status to say that the estimated repair time was just two words: "Assessing Condition".

So thats basically a question mark at this point. A fallen tree branch? Downed pole? Blown transformer? Who knows.

I'm still at the motel for now. Unless the call is made to stay one last night, we'll be returningnhome tomorrow morning. All that will probably await us is a dark and chilly house.

Called it.

Power went out at 7:23 AM and the electric company believes it might not be until the 14th for most of the customers in my area to get their power back.

1120 customers were affected in my area.

I'm posting this from a library. So I have a small chance to post one new art piece for the moment. Can't edit it much through a tablet though.

TL;DR: my entire viewing area is under a winter storm warning starting 23 minutes from this post (5:37 AM) and going until noon tomorrow. Power outages are likely, as is tree damage. I'm going to cross my fingers that I don't lose power again like the last time a fricking winter storm blew through (which was last month on the 6th).

Lost power a little after 8 AM due to the winter storm. Spent several hours listening to tree branches breaking under the weight of the ice that acumulated.

I reported it to the power company, but the bad news is that the restoration time is Jan 9th at 6PM at the latest. So about 3 days on the dark is what I'm looking at.

My mother can't stay at home in these conditions because her immune system is compromised. If she gets a fever at this point on her treatments for her medical issues, it could be fatal. So we're shacking up on a motel for the next little while.

This has let me check online to see how many people are affected by the storm (735). The work crews have to proceed carefully to clear fallen tree branches and other hazards before they can get the power back up. Its probably going to be slow going for a nit I guess.

I fell asleep soon after checking in. Its 12:57 in the morning as I type this on my android tablet.

Don't have a laptop, so this is the best I can manage right now.

I have noticed that custom thumbnails seem to be broken. I could upload one with an image but it doesn't display. This is kind of a big deal since sometimes a thumbnail is better for me to use to convey content warnings than the entire image being the thumbnail in people's notifications.

So I was let in the know this morning. Mom almost didn't come home; when she went to the ER a week ago, it was because she was having a heart attack. And it wasn't one arterial blockage, it was three. They couldn't do a bypass because her lungs are too weak. But they did manage to get the stints in place and her diet is more restrictive. On top of this, the number of medications she has to take daily has increased and this means blood thinners and nitroglycerin are two of them.

Now that I know what happened, I'm not as worked up as I had been. Its still alarming, but she's improved and she'll need to take it easy now.

TL;DR: Mom is home from the hospital now.

I may wish to know what is going in in particular, but she'll tell me when she's ready.

Until then, I have some stuff to do to prepare her new computer for her use involving file transfers from the HDD from her old PC. If I can get my sister off of the blasted thing long enough to do my "family IT" job. o_o

Mom's still at the hospital. Due to her white blood cells being in the state that they are, they decided to not do the stint. But they do need to find out what is going on with her heart, so they're going to go looking for a blockage with a camera.

This means she'll be staying at the hospital for another day or two at the very least. But for now she's stable and doing okay, as far as I know.

Its hard to keep my act together when the month seems to want multiple things to go wrong. First it was the well drying up (or the water pump dying, we don't know which) and now its my Mom.

Mom's in the hospital and I'm staying back to field phone calls for her. My dad's with her as well. But this is making me a ball of anxiety and worry.

She's been in the hospital for almost 2 days now. And it started with chest pain after eating akin to heartburn. At first it was likely reactions with her medications, but she apparently needs some kind of stint and her heart was mentioned. It was only supposed to be a single overnight observation stay.

Not knowing what exactly is going on is nerve wracking, especially when you know the doctors might be downplaying it to keep us from going mental.

Edit @ 10 PM: Mom's doing okay for the moment. The doctors are having trouble finding a vein to place the stint through, but she always had that little "feature" that makes it hard to place IV's or the like. They can't place the stint until they find a good enough vein for it.

Guppic is also hosting a raffle. Looks like their second one, too.

The winner gets one solo pin-up style pic either SFW or NSFW complete with a BG.

So if you want to enter the raffle for a chance to get a piece of free art, check out the raffle above. It closes on September 2nd!

SweetVixsin is hosting a raffle to celebrate their birthday!

They also have a second raffle for anyone who purchased art from them at least a year ago at the bare minimum. So two raffles in one day and there is no rule saying you can't sign up for both.

So if you have an interest in rolling the dice for a piece of free art and/or a redraw of a commission you got from them at least a year ago, check them out. :)

So Guppic is holding a raffle. Check it out here.

The rules are simple:
* +fav the submission
* +Watch (or already be a watcher of) Guppic.
* Comment on it.
* And if you want an extra raffle ticket number, do what I have done and post a journal mentioning the raffle and link to it in the comment on said raffle.

In other news, blasted sweltering weather is driving me insane already. x_x

First a phone/Internet outage, now a power outage.

The weather got windy after those showers. The electric company thinks a tree got knocked down or something. However the current estimate for power restoration is 6 PM tomorrow (and it is 9:50 PM now).

This bites, doesn't it?

Going to go lay down under blankets. No heat + wind + drafts = chilly temperatures.

Edit: The power company update their outage report. It now reads that the cause is "tree contact". That means it should be fairly easy to remove the tree and restore service. They just need some chainsaws and a cherry picker truck, I think. This does not change the estimated service restoration time however.

Yay~ DSL is back in working order. Now to get back to planning my next upload. :)

Almost 24 hours later. Landline works again, but the DSL is still non-functional.

I heard on the news that a considerable nationwide disruption of cellular and internet service has occurred this morning concerning AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Can't say if it is related or not.

Landline phone died today. Checked what wiring I could and couldn't find the problem. A technician will be here by Friday to have a look (hopefully).

Until then I can't do much. I can post this journal because of a borrowed phone and an incognito browser tab. This means I don't have access to Discord or my email for the time being.

TL;DR: My mother went in for her appointment today and according to her doctor, her immune system is dangerously weak. Weak enough that she has to wear a mask when she goes anywhere (and so do the rest of us) to avoid ending up in the ER.

Her immune system was weaker than most people's for decades, we just accepted it. But now its something we need to be very much aware of when it comes to planning trips for necessities. Because she was told that if her immune level is currently at 0.9 (I think) and if it drops below 0.5, she's in trouble.

Not going to be long-winded about this.

She went in while I slept. Nobody told me so I wouldn't get freaked out. All I did get, after I noticed that neither she nor my dad were at home, was they she started experiencing pain near her kidneys while cooking dinner. They are hoping its kidney stones, and frankly so am I.

Edit: It is kidney stones. But there's also concerns about other things and they'll be keeping her for tests and observation for at least a day, maybe two.

So TweetDeck is becoming a subscription-only ("Twitter Blue") feature in under 30 days. The newest push to monetize that social media platform.

The API for the old version of TweetDeck has been removed citing efforts to reduce data scraping. This broke any lingering app that relied on the old version of TweetDeck. At the same time, people who were still using said version were "switched" up to the "TweetDeck Preview" version, which is the one that is going behind a paywall in 30 days.

If you never used TweetDeck or anything like it, this isn't a problem for you. But if you do (or did) and you used its columns feature to track multiple users concurrently, your experience on the platform is about to get a lot more inconvenient in 30 days as you'll either have to start giving Elon your money or get used to doing a lot of scrolling in the standard Twitter site/app.

There's been evidence that this move was planned since long before Elon bought the company, but the fact that its happening now with everything else Elon has done to ban 3rd party clients... Let's just say that its going to get a lot more frustrating to scan twitter to see if any artists (exclusively on that platform or not) have opened for commissions.

See, this is more or less why I like Discord. >_>

Simply put, I'm stuck at home again this year. It was too expensive in a few previous years, then the Pandemic hit. This year I was stopped from registering by more pressing life priorities, with the icing on the cowpatty cake being losing our one functional car to the train collision.

I'll plan for attending again in 2024, provided we can find a new car before then and nothing happens to it. There's other concerns I have to keep an eye on, but the car search is the big thing at the moment.

I will continue to purchase art commissions where and when I am able. And even if they don't get posted in my gallery, the majority of them should show up elsewhere before too long.

I do have a Discord account so I can talk to people more expediently than through FA notes/comments. My Discord handle did change due to their removal of the #<insert numbers here> discriminators. Its just swordfox there now, no capitals.

It took me a couple of days to emotionally process this. I was a bit of a mess on the day it happened.

I live fairly close to a railroad track. Its close enough that it takes just five minutes to walk to the tracks. Under a minute if you use a car.

The road we have to take to get to the mail boxes and the main road is a private one, laid with gravel. The point where the train tracks cross through the road is paved and it has signs, but no train crossing guards or anything like that.

Nearly three days ago, on April 25th, my father went out to the grocer to do some very light shopping. This happens every few days, but this time things went very different...

This time...my father's car got hit by a train. It even made the news on three local news websites, though thankfully they didn't mention my dad by name or get detailed about it.

It was a passenger side collision and the airbags in his car failed to deploy. He was wearing his seat belt and that kept him from getting more than a cracked sternum, so I'm thankful for that. Usually when I hear about "car vs train" accidents on the news, the outcome is far worse. The fact my dad survived with only a cracked sternum was an outright miracle.

He was in good enough condition that he was able to move around on his own, though I don't know if he needed help to get out of the car or not. The collision totaled the car though.

I can't say if my dad was on his way back from the store or on his way to the store when it happened, I heard of it after the fact. What I know is that the train failed to sound its horn to warn him that it was coming, the police judged that he attempted to cross when he wasn't supposed to, and that its not likely that we can't claim insurance for it (I think that's what they said). The vehicle was lease-to-own too and we barely had it for two weeks.

I was an anxious mess all day that day and I even broke down crying for a few minutes. I always considered my dad a grumpy jerk for a 70-something, finding reasons to get cranky if the there were less than 7 bowls in the kitchen cabinet. But he's also the only father I have. This accident rattled me good.

But as for his injuries... As I said, he got very damn lucky. They kept him at the hospital overnight for observation and released him yesterday around mid-morning. He can't bend over or lift anything heavier than a few pounds until his sternum heals and that could take a few months.

As for transportation... We're looking for a new car again. I think we've got a rental for now, so we can still go shopping. But I don't think anyone will want to go anywhere any time soon after that very damn close call...

So  CompleteAlienation hit a 5000 watcher milestone a few days ago. To celebrate this, they are holding a free art raffle.

Its been going for about four days now as of this writing, and it will end in about nine days at which point the winner will be drawn out of the pool of entries.

You can read the raffle's rules and also enter here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/43693317/