Gone With the Wind

Dear Readers,

I was prevented from making further posts in 2013 by Super Typhoon Haiyan (known here in the Philippines as "Yolanda"), which had the uncanny effect of knocking my entire province back in time a few decades. Not only was I without a cellphone connection for 24 days, and electricity for 39 days, but I was without anything like a reliable internet connection until about an hour ago, when I discovered a hole-in-the-wall internet cafe here in the provincial capital city whose owner had come up with the brilliant idea of using a plug-in wi-fi modem. The bandwidth remains weak, but it's all I needed to go on Facebook (for the first time since November 21) and notify my friends of my reappearance online. Now let's see if I can get my cable TV back so I can rely on something other than rumor (known contemptuously to us foreigners as the "bamboo telegraph") for my news of the world.