I'd have to agree with previous posts and I have had that same experience. [g] But it doesn't usually bother me. I've had the experience that as soon as there is one or two responses, usually you get more interest in your post. I often wonder if that is because people want to see what someone else said. I would much rather have any response, rather than no response. I don't even care if someone has not had any experience and was just reminded of something funny they want to share. At least then I get a conversation out of it. Really, I think 99% of people are eager to share some experience they've had to help you out, so if I don't get a helpful response, I think that either I worded the title of my post in such a way that my question was not clear, or no one had any experience with my problem or any helpful suggestions. If I really need an answer and my post is dropping, I will bump it up and ask again or ask my question at a different forum. OR....sometimes it occurs to me to Google it! lol More often then not I get a perfectly good answer! Sometimes traffic on the forums has been a little slow.

Thank you, ladies. We all have different roads to travel. Until I was 17 I'd never travelled over 30 miles from home ... then my Dad, who had bronchitis and incipient asthma and felt that his farming days were numbered in our location ... ... moved 1,600 miles to the Prairies in Saskatchewan, where he share-cropped for a while, then bought his own farm - and had 40 years of good health. And we react to the experiences of our lives in different ways. I was away to Univ. when Dad remarried, and we got a ready-made (pretty, vivacious) sister in that deal, a bit younger than we three boys. We didn't get along too well with stepmother (but sister, who became a school-teacher, didn't like her very well, either). She loved Dad - said that he never treated her any differently than the boys. Spent several years helping some refugees with nothing get their lives operational again, just after the Korean War. Met a somewhat younger woman from Iowa at Cornell Univ., married in Korea, and son, who was born there, later needed eye care, so we settled in Canada and I became a clergyperson. Later Sue, who became head of food service in the Psych. Hosp. where my Mom had been incarcerated 30 years earlier, felt that she needed to live on her own and we scarcely spoke for 35 years - something of a shame: life's too short for that. That caused disruption of my career - clergy didn't do that, almost 40 years ago! When, over 20 years later, they talked of closing her establishment or another a few miles away, she took early retirement, had a happy 10 years of life doing various things, including spending winters between FL and TX (later also AZ when our daughter lived there for a time) in her RV. Contracted colon cancer, died at 66, just under 3 years ago ... kids said that in the ordinary course, Mom would have retired "last year" ... and I added that she'd have been sick for most of that year. I'm very thankful, as I approach 80, to be enjoying good health. Dad said that he wanted to leave his farm better than he found it - he felt that way about his community, also, though I never heard him say so. Though I am thankful, proud and happy to be Canadian, I also consider myself something of a citizen of the world, as well ... and I hope that I can leave it better than I found it. And here I am ... hijacking a "Mother's Day discussion" thread! Sorry, folks. ole joyful

Mike, Thanks for your kind words. Every firefighter in Oklahoma works hard and today I know that many of them have been working nonstop all day long and some of them seem likely to be working late into the night, if not all night long. The news coming out of various parts of OK today, and particularly northeastern and eastern OK, has been horrible. Not only have the fires been moving dangerously fast, driven by incredibly strong winds, but there's been so many of them and there's just not enough firefighters and firetrucks to get to every fire quickly. It is a horrific situation. I've already seen news stories about one firefighter being struck by a vehicle driven by a civilian and another one about fire overrunning a firetruck. Thankfully, the firefighters got out of that burning truck alive, but at least one of them was injured. The images of the huge smoke plumes, burned rangeland, vehicles backed up on closed roads (due to smoke or to protect the safety of the firefighters fighting fire right along the road), burning barns and homes, etc......it all is so heartbreaking. When we have a Red Flag Fire Warning in particular, almost anything can spark a fire.....not just cigarettes tossed from windows, but arcing power lines, squirrels that get into transformers and get fried....falling to the ground and igniting it....chains or something else dragging from a vehicle, etc. We've had fires started by a spark from welding, overheating of chargers attached to various piecs of equipment, even sparks from tractors, balers, mowers, brush hogs, etc. Often your firefighters are running from one fire to another so quickly that they don't even have time to think about what might have started a specific fire. They just want to get it under control before it does further damage. We have not had any fires today, and I am not complaining. We always were marginal for a Red Flag Fire Warning (although we did have one) because our relative humidity was going to stay fairly high (for a Red Flag day, though not high overall) and our wind was only going to gust into the mid- to upper-30s). I told Tim this morning "I think the Green Country is going to burn today because they're going to have the worst winds" and hated that this is what did happen. I feel relieved we didn't have fires today. We had a huge one last week (3800 acres burned on a day when the when was blowing around 11 mph...and it was as odd as it sounds, but this fire was making its own wind by late afternoon) and usually what happens after a huge fire is that it is very quiet for the next week or two. Why? My best guess is that the huge smoke plume scares everyone so much that they are extra careful for the next few days. I think we've only had 3 fires since that big one, so it seems everyone here has been extra careful lately. I was like a cat on a hot tin roof today, pacing and watching the wind and listening to the scanner traffic. Finally, I relaxed as time passed and we weren't paged out, and then I went out to the garden and planted, watered, weeded and mulched. I kept thinking something might happen because our wind got really strong for a couple of hours this afternoon, but it stayed quiet. I hope our luck holds for a few more days. I heard either large limbs or entire trees crashing to the ground in both our woodland and our neighbor's woodland today. Likely they were trees that were dead or dying, but I hate hearing the cracking sound as trees come down in the wind. My thoughts are with all the firefighters serving our state and their local communities tonight, and particularly with those who have been injured today. I hope they are able to get all these fires extinguished and that the loss of homes and property is kept to a minimum. Sometimes I think we forget that when, for example, a ranch burns, it isn't just the barn and the fences that burn, but sometimes the houses and the animals, the tractors, the bales of hay stored up for future use, other equipment, the gates, the feeders, the waterers.....and most of all....it is someone's livelihood and their dream all going up in flames. On a day like this, a lot of dreams are burning and that is such a horrible thing. I hope tomorrow will be better but fire danger still will be somewhat elevated. Dawn

This is why I have a gmail account rather than use my internet providers email. If I were you I might think about switching to a mail service like that and slowly switching my mail over in case there is a time you do want to switch providers. I never thought I would move after being in the same place for 20 years but life happened and I had to move to an area that did not have my old provider. I was saved one less hassle of having to change all of my email addresses on web sites. Which was great because until all my address changes went through I didn't have to worry about missing billing statements or account notifications. For the issue you had yesterday I would not change providers. I would though call and maybe make a complaint on who you spoke with yesterday. I am sure even if you did not get her name yourself they do have a note of it on their end. They should never treat a customer so poorly that the customer feels they need to cuss to get their point across. I know sometimes customer service people have bad days and sometimes it is the customer who treats them poorly but this does not sound like the case. It sounds like this customer service person was down right rude and who knows maybe you are not the first and the company needs to know. I hope everything is fixed now and you are having a better day today.