It's Electrifyin'!

Hey, all ~

The good news is, I found the camera and have taken a bunch of great pictures of things I can't wait to share with all of you.

The bad news is, right before I made yet another eternal 3+ -- emphasis on the "+" -- hour trek up to the airport to pick up Z (last time! He's home now!) our little single story house received a direct hit by lightning on Friday afternoon and fried quite a bit of our electronics, despite surge protectors on all of it. Darn it! Doesn't Mother Nature know that fried things are bad for your health?

The lightning damaged the following:
old unused satellite dish
blew the breakers/fuses in the house
sound system
input #1 on the new flat screen TV (where it hooks up to the cable box or DVD player)
computer CPU
keyboard
mouse
cables in the walls
internet modem
cable box
port on the printer (weird -- the printer will work if you plug it into the wall and use it as a copier, but it can't communicate or send info to a computer because the port itself is fried, a brand new USB cable and various other attempts to fix it did nothing. My brilliant hubby, the IT guy, had some odd sounding mumblings when he discovered this little unusual tidbit, but nothing discernable from across the room where I was sitting.)

Funnily enough, the light and vent fan over the stove had quit working about two weeks prior to this event, and they work just fine now.

Luckily there was no fire, although there are charred (yes, charred) bits of an old satellite dish in my garbage can (formerly strewn across the yard). Not ours. The previous tenants left it up there, so at least it wasn't actively in use or anything. K and I are fine (we were the only ones home at that time -- and darn it, my hair is still frizzy and curly. I guess I have an excuse now).

We have already gotten a new keyboard, mouse, and printer and had the cable and internet guys out to fiddle with the house wiring today. We still haven't seen the electrician yet, but we've not experienced anything negative so far and we've been using lights and cooking. So everything is probably OK. Yay! Sesame Street in the mornings again so I can carve out an hour to cram in dishes and folding laundry in peace. Yay. And the camera and dock had not been hooked up the computer yet, so they're fine. Yay.

(Although, I always covet new camera toys and might not have been devestated if our really (really) old camera had bit the dust).

The bad news: our renters insurance does not cover things like this, because it is considered "an act of God".

The good news: our surge protector companies will cover the items, but we have to mail the items to them, let them assess the equipment and determine that surge overload did indeed cause the problem, and then they will issue a store credit somewhere so we can get new unfried equipment. Which means we have to figure out what one store would have everything we need with the best prices. We tend to shop around for the best deal under normal circumstances. On the other hand, if they're paying for it, that extra 50 bucks on one item really doesn't affect us so much I guess.

The bad news: if we do that, we lose everything on the old computer's hard drive, if it is at all salvagable. Including family pictures since A was about 6 months old (we never could afford to have many printed, but I could do all sorts of things digitally to keep grandparents happy), and lots of music files for church -- which Z uses several times weekly to prepare for services. And my design software... Some of it is backed up, but not all of it. I'm constantly taking pictures; I feel wasteful to pop in a new disk every day for its paltry photo count, just to back it up. And really, whodathunkit? How often does your house get struck by lightning anyway? Argh. I'm experiencing the agony of delete. I'm also going to have to try to remember all the websites and resources I had saved under "favorites" for helping A with his autism, or several "just for fun" sites, whenever we get the house computer. Which may be a few months from now, so I will probably be desperately surfing here in the next couple of evenings -- well, except tomorrow, it's Weds Bible study -- and write them down while I can still remember how to navigate to them.

Bottom line: Z can possibly save some or all of the information if he keeps the CPU, we eat the cost of a new one, and he can tinker with it. Or we can save a thousand bucks or so and just let it go. If it winds up being the latter, I will shed a tear (or forty-two) over the lost photographs, but would actually be more upset over the loss of our entire audio archives. We had over 1,000 songs in our database. That's going to be expensive to replace, even if you can go to iTunes or Amazon for .99 a pop. We've only bought a few actual albums, the rest has been accumulated over time.

The whole ordeal was actually kind of interesting, once my heart rate slowed down and my stomach returned to its rightful place (instead of in my feet). We'd had a nasty storm that morning complete with hail and lots of the aforementioned lightning, but it had been quiet for about 2 hours. I gave K a bath, did some dishes, and had just pulled her out of the tub about 5 minutes before this sucker came out of NOWHERE. There was no warning, no distant rumblies to indicate anything storm-wise was approaching. I guess WE were the warning for everyone else.

I was standing by one of our front windows watching for my son's school bus, idly watching a neighbor across the street come out of his house, zip up his jacket, and nonchalantly start strolling down the sidewalk to the community mailbox. (We have those stupid communal boxes on a post, instead of delivery to the houses. Yuck.)

Then it hit. It was a fascinating thing -- interesting because I have never experienced anything like it (and hope to avoid it in the future). The house across the street was literally whited out (is that even a phrase?), I could not see it at all, and simultaneously there was this loud sizzly banging sound (think of about 200 or so cannons at the end of the 1812 Overture, positioned directly behind your head) -- and everything electric in the house fell silent or dark. I felt like I'd been hit in the stomach with something, and both K and I actually leapt up off the floor when it happened. She started screaming, of course (truth be told, I might have let out a yelp while I was jumping up in the air, but I really don't remember). The guy across the street was in a dead sprint back to his house as soon as I could see out the window again -- if he wasn't a blue ribbon winner in high school track meets, he sure could have been on Friday. Dude was moving it. Can you blame him?

And then, after pulling myself together and throwing the extremely hot and smelly galvanized sound system out into the rain so the smoldering ruin didn't catch my house on fire, and getting my son off Mario Andretti's school bus, I left for the airport. I just prayed the house didn't burn down.

About, oh, 15 minutes into the trek, my son decided to share with K and I that he had received a stomach virus from a classmate at school. Fun times, especially since it was pouring rain by that point and I had only brought one change of clothes for him. I (correctly) surmised that there would be some serious delayage due to the weather, and I (also correctly) surmised that Mr. A was not quite finished yet and had more of that fount of knowledge to share -- so we grimly pressed on in the vomitmobile. Z's first word was, "Wheeeeewwwwww!" when he climbed into the car three and a half hours later.

Hey, every day is an adventure around here. Have I said that before?

I am currently on my husband's laptop from work, upon which I cannot upload pictures (I am not allowed to incorporate that sort of software to do so on his work computer). So whenever we can get a household computer again, there will be a vat o' entries because I have pictures to share of all kinds of stuff (don't worry, no vomit pictures).

Be prepared for the blog post onslaught.

Don't say I didn't warn you.