Breaking Loose the Vaults of Heaven

This time I can't blame myself for being a slacker in not maintaining regular postings on my blog. This time the honor goes to Mother Nature.

Two Fridays ago we had a typical summer thunder storm. It was a fast-moving storm that brought a sudden downpour of rain and plenty of pyrotechnics.

It was bright and sunny when Ariana and I first started out after my picking her up from work. We stopped in Acushnet to pick up her friends, Jessica and Josh, and their baby Alexia.

We went to the snake store to get Ariana's snake a rat and then to the bank for Ariana to set up a checking account and deposit her first pay check. I also had a check to deposit.

As I was doing my transaction, I noticed that the sky had gotten dark very fast. In fact, everyone noticed.

After the bank, we had to go to Shaw's so that Jessica could pick up some formula for Alexia. Josh, the baby, and I stayed in the car while the girls went in.

While waiting for the girls, Josh and I watched the lightning in the west and the clouds moving in an easterly direction at a fast clip. I had predicted that there will be a downpour by the time the girls got out.

I was less than a minute off in my prediction.

It already started to rain by the time Ariana and Jessica left the store. By the time we were out of the parking lot, the vaults of heaven broke loose. Raindrops the size of cats' paws came down hard on the windshield.

We still had one more errand to run. I had to stop at Denise's Pet Care to pick up a gift card that Peter, the store's owner, was donating to my church for it's Chinese auction.

Sylvester, the shop cat, definitely decided to stay in today. Can you blame him? The rain was coming down in buckets so hard that I got soaked just running from my car to the store.

With each flash of lightning, the lights flickered in the store, causing me to wonder if we were going to lose power at our house.

Going back home, I realized that the gas tank was running low. So I stopped at the Mobile station just further up the road. There was no gas because the service station had lost power.

We all wondered if we were in store for the same fate at home. But while pulling into the driveway, we could see the living room lights through the windows.

However, once I got into the house, I noticed the dishwasher flashing "PF" on its display and the clock on the stove reading "RESET." So we did lose power after all.

Being a somewhat anal stickler for accuracy, I used the time on my cell phone so that I could set the clock right down to the last second. I was waiting for the minute to change so that I could punch in the final digit on the clock.

But before that could happen, there was a flash of lightning and a VERY loud crack in the kitchen that sounded like it was just behind me. I jumped at the sound. And as I jumped, my finger hit the last key that I was waiting to press. Well, I wasn't about to quibble over a few seconds this time.

What was strange was the Neil also heard a very loud crack that sounded like it came from inside the house. However, Neil was in his room in the diametrically opposite corner of the house.

The lightning must have hit something on the house that caused it to travel through the house.

But what?

We had a lightning arrestor installed on the electrical service to the house decades ago when my in-laws used the house for their consulting engineering business. So the lightning could not have travelled through the electrical wires.

However, the mystery was soon solved when someone went on the computer to get onto the Internet. There was no Internet connection. Nada.

And the cable box was dead, too.

So instead of travelling through the electrical wires, the lightning travelled through the broadband and TV cables.

Somehow, Neil's computer was not affected as adversely as mine. After some fiddling around, he managed to get Internet on his computer.

No such luck with mine.

Apparently the lightning strike fried out the computer router and the cables running to my computer.

A replacement router that Neil had kicking around did not work. He was going to have to order a new router and new cables and pray that would do the trick.

Getting the cable TV back in order was no problem. I called the cable company on Monday, and a technician arrived the next day to swap out the damaged box. It didn't even take 15 minutes. The cable guy spent far less time in our house than he did in his van across the street.

Now we had to wait for the parts for my computer to arrive.

The router arrived on Wednesday while the cables arrived on Thursday. However, Neil could not work on my computer that day because he had to attend an interview up towards Boston.

I finally had Internet late in the day on Friday.

Yay! Yahoo!

I am once again "connected."