I got home this morning, and after doing a little rewiring on a phone jack, seemed to get everything up, including DSL.

Driving home from Fort Lauderdale International, I was impressed at the damage. You've all heard the expression, "Gee, it looks like a hurricane came through here." Well, it really, really looks like a hurricane came through here. Lots of dead and uprooted trees, bereft of leaves, toppled palms, skeletons of billboards, piles of debris. And it's been almost two weeks since the storm. The house is all right, other than a lot of damaged foliage, and screens blown out on the pool patio. Fortunately, the frame is in good shape, so it's just a matter of screen replacement.

Now to catch up on a couple weeks of business around here.

lucky to still have the frame. in my mom's neighborhood, they're all imploded - not a single pool screen still standing.

No luck involved. It's not one of the flimsy modern ones--it's an old frame, made out of aluminum I-beams.

Rand's comment, "... and it's been almost two weeks", shows how difficult recoveries are. South Florida is a fairly wealthy area but struggles with cleanup. I've heard the same thing from my sister in Miami Beach.

If you consider the greater impact of Katrina and the poorness of some of the hardest hit areas, then two years is fairly short.

I went through the 1967 Detroit riot. What with all the recent fanfare attendant to the death of the great Rosa Parks, I'm amazed that the area around Rosa Parks Blvd in Detroit still looks as if it went through a war. Sometimes it takes more than forty years to recover.