[Raine]

Hello, I'm posting again for the first time in 2 days. Why you might ask? Well there are a few reasons, but namely, my power has been off since 3 pm Friday and was just restored today at 5 am. Interestingly, my house, along with about 20 others in a neighbourhood of around 600 homes was one of the last to have power restored after the big storm Friday. 6 houses down in either direction, the power was working fine, just our little strip was out for this long. What does this mean? No internet, no a/c, food in the fridge goes bad, you know the drill. Toronto Hydro's excuse? "Oh, we didn't realize your area was down due to the fact that it was such a small block of homes. We saw everyone else in the neighbourhood on and figured it was the whole strip"... yeah okay, tell me that again when I've called you 4 times asking when my power would be back on... and speaking of times, they said "We'll have it on by 7 am Saturday" then it was 10 am, then 2 pm, then 7 pm, and if it wasn't on by 11 pm, it would probably be Sunday morning.. in a city the size of Toronto where we pay taxes up the wazoo, I didn't see ONE hydro worker anywhere I drove in a 10 km radius working on anything.

What else happened? My basement, which many of you have heard me raving about finishing myself and having spent many dollars and hours working on, is in shambles. Why, Al?? What happened?! The local sewers backed up, causing water to seep in and destroy my beautiful laminate floors and up the drywall about a foot.. also among the casualties of my basement were: my paintball marker, my numark mixer, my turn tables (all in a case in storage in the furnace room), my printer, two really nice paradigm speakers... all told at least $6-7 grand worth of damage down there alone...

Here's the best part. The reason the water backed up and flooded everyone's basement in the area is because just a year and a half ago, 200+ new homes went up in a former hydro corridor... and just last week, we received a notice from our councillor's office notifying us of a distruption of local traffic as they needed to replace the existing main with a new one because in a high demand situation, the current water main would not be able to support the amount of run off from all the new homes. The city had the chance, and was asked to improve the main before the new homes were built, but elected not to. Now they are in a state where they have 200+ residents of the old homes with water damage as a result of their oversight... anyway. Thought I'd rant. On the bright side, my car was inside during the hail storm, so it doesn't have anymore dings on it :P