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At Saturday night's "Electrify Your Strings" performance with Mark Wood, the first lead violinist of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Hannah was featured on electric violin on "Eleanor Rigby" . . . and she was awesome.

For rights reasons we were asked not to post video of the concert (and video is the work of the devil anyway), but the local news covered it and captured her having an amazing great time -- see it here.

The elementary music program is currently on the chopping block. Why music is always considered optional, when it's an integral part of our everyday lives and one of the most important things to our culture, is just beyond me.

The myth of the magical efficiency of the marketplace can generally be discredited with two words: "customer service." As our retailers have combined, merged and globalized, as fewer and fewer people in the retail world have any reason to care whether or not you are satisfied with a product or service, customer service has become a thing of the past. We buy into this by shopping at the big boxes, which not only take no responsibility for the products they sell but likely won't be selling the same "brands" next year as they did this year - and I put "brands" in quotes because they have become truly meaningless marks, no longer representing a particular company or factory, but simply a stamp put on something sourced from anonymous (and interchangeable) vendors in China. And we buy into this by buying only on price, putting the local stores that provided customer service out of business. And while some large retailers (Target and Amazon.com, in my experience) are generous on returns, too many others hide behind barely expired warranties and fine print and fail to show any concern for the customer's experience at all.

So it's refreshing to have had a series of very satisfying experiences with customer service over the past few months where companies actually lived up to warranties, provided new or repaired merchandise, or generally acted in ways that used to be commonplace, way back in the dark ages when people who lived in your communities ran your stores.

So click to find out who made me happy . . . .

Day 5 and counting since all this started. Schools are closed once again, partly because they're being used as shelters, partly because rural areas are still not cleared. Our power went up and down yesterday, but they fixed the broken line on Saturday night so the dangerous part is over, and thanks to the thousands we spent on having trees removed a couple of years ago, our house escaped unscathed. The big maple in the back hardly lost a twig, which is surprising, as it has shed a lot of wood the last couple of years. I can't remember an ice storm where the ice lingered so long, but today it's getting into the 40s and if there's any sun at all the last of the ice should come off and start to melt, and we can get back to normal.

or I've messed them up for life. It's a fine line. I was in a shop with Hannah yesterday, and we were looking at a book of sports records, which had a classic picture of Lance Armstrong in the maillot jaune on the cover. I asked her, "What's wrong with that cover?" and without missing a beat, she said, "He's wearing a Postal jersey. He set the record with Discovery, and it's a book on breaking records."

Precisely. Couldn't be more proud. In fairness, he broke the record, with 6 wins, with Postal. But his record of 7 was set with Discovery Channel. We won't be buying the book.

Well, the Sink Hole that Ate My Yard has settled down. The consensus among the usual suspects is that none of them are to blame, and I think they're right. One opinion, that there may once have been a septic tank there, seemed absurd, but poking and prodding revealed a couple of concrete blocks way down at the bottom of the hole, so the possibility of a previous structure cannot be ruled out. It's a hard time of year to get dirt delivered but I did get some over here this morning and then spent a hardly hour or so pitching very wet topsoil down into a very deep hole. The joys of homeownership. Arrgh.

Is it a sign of the apocalypse when a giant hole opens up in your yard? Or is it just a promotional gimmick for Ghostbusters III? If the latter, I wasn't advised. It turns out it's pretty hard to get anyone excited over a giant hole in the yard – the town was quick to check it out, but it wasn't by the water line and hadn't swallowed the road, so they went on their way. I knew it was near the gas line, but as it hadn't yet exploded, that detail wasn't too interesting to my gas provider. Once I confirmed that I could see bare gas pipe in the hole and called back with that information, I got a little bit more attention, but they still didn't know quite what to do. After pulling some teeth, I got them to commit to looking at it. Someday.

So, if you're walking around my yard, watch your step!

And just like that, April is over. Hard to believe. Well, I accomplished much, though you wouldn't know it from the blog. For starters, I left a job that was very hard to leave -- which is something like an accomplishment. More than 17 years of public service, 12 years with the same organization, and 9-1/2 years in the same position, the time finally came to stop being The Man and to return to sticking it to The Man. My days are now filled with blog commenting and angry letters to the editor about the gummint. Okay, not really. Instead, I'm using my time wisely, getting closer to my Sawzall. Spent two days this week (a day longer than should have been necessary) replacing a seriously rotten garage door. Of course, that only led to making the other door (the people door) look ratty in comparison. Okay, it looked ratty without the comparison -- a wooden door that we rescued from a junkyard years ago, which I built the frame for, and which hasn't closed right in years. So, that had to go, too. Daughter came down this morning and said "There's a hole in the garage wall." Not entirely accurate -- in fact, most of the wall is just gone. It'll be replaced soon, I promise; in the meantime, the neighboring cats won't have to sneak into the garage anymore, they can just stroll right in through the lack of front wall.

There has also been bike-riding, old-photo-scanning, shopping, free-timing, book-reading, and a general relaxing that I could get very very used to.

When we first moved here, one of the things we loved about our little postage stamp was that it was a postage stamp covered with trees. Our fraction of an acre was LOUSY with the tall wood and the small wood. Two giant firs in the back, a little stand of small maples and black locust (which plays out the "oh god they're coming back out of the ground!" part of every zombie movie, every week), a big old perfect red maple and two more silvers in the back. Front yard had some other little maple tree stuck right in the middle of the yard. And then there was the granddaddy (perhaps the great granddaddy) of them all, an enormous old red maple that probably predated the house. It was about five feet across at the base, deeply tangled in the power/phone/cable wires, and was somewhere north of 50 feet tall. All of those maples were the gift that keeps on giving -- buds, seeds, sticks and leaves all year round, but not delivered in a convenient sandwich bag. In fact, each fall we'd have to stuff all that wonderful nature into at least 80 giant leaf bags. It was a major chore.

They weren't young, either, at least most of them weren't. The first to go was the front yard maple, which served no purpose whatsoever and ruined any running around space the yard offered for toddlers. The little maples and the locust in the back we cut down about three hundred times, then gave up on for a while. Then last year we took down the firs, which were dangerously nevergreen and clearly didn't have their hearts in the tree thing anymore. Suddenly, there was light in the backyard. Grass grew. It was amazing.

The ice storm a couple of months back took down a scary big branch from the granddaddy out front, and it was clear it had to come down. An army of tree guys descended on us Tuesday morning (with a CRANE) and took that sucker down in a ridiculously short amount of time (considering what I was paying for this early morning entertainment). And while we were at it, would we take a deal to get rid of those other two maples along the back? Well, why the hell not.

So our wonderful, wooded, grass-free shade lot is now pretty much like any other suburban yard (or at least any other yard that is spotted with raspberry canes throughout). Sure, I've screwed up our carbon balance and may have to explain that to a dying earth someday, but at least I no longer need to fear a giant maple branch killing one of the neighbors' kids. So, I'll just breathe a little slower for the rest of my life, and it should all even out.