Here's the full story...
Thursday morning 5:30am
Thunderstorms in area
My husband and I were eating breakfast when we heard a loud POP! It wasn't unlike a helium balloon that pops. It startles you, and it's loud. The lights went out completely and we smelled something hot.
My husband, being next to the door that leads to the dining room had somehow zoomed out of the kitchen.
"Get out of there," he said in a rather normal but stern voice.
Yeah. I was up, out of my chair, and when I got into the dining room where we waited to see what more would happen, I realized I still had the butter knife in my hand!
In the next five or so minutes Dennis located his flashlight, and went down into the musky basement to see if the circuit breaker had done its job. It had. He turned it back on and lights were working--except for the ones above the table where we had been sitting. This is a fan light. Odd thing about lightning and electricity--it is very selective as to how it travels and where to. The fan part was working. The lights were not.
"That's weird," I said.
Upon checking the light bulbs, we found they had been fried--blackened! Then, I noticed the digital clock on the stove wasn't working. We checked the range. It was working. The oven was not.
What else had it done to the house? We were worried about a possible fire, of course, so that had to be checked out. We, living in the country, have lightning rods on this 1906 farm house that stands three stories tall. As far as we could tell, there was no fire.
My computer was plugged into a surge protector. But I had done one thing the night before, that I sometimes do when I know that there are bad storms in the area--I unplugged the phone cord from the modem.
I went to work with the story about our oven and lights getting fried. I later learned that day that one digital fan was also fried. And when I went to check my computer (I had unplugged it for the day, worried about it being fried.) It came back to life, slowly. I kept looking at a black screen and the little boxes at the bottom where my files were. Eventually, the computer came back on. OMG!
But when I tried to get on line--nothing. The phone was dead! I called the phone company and put in an order.
FRIDAY:
The phone technician had been out on Friday, zooming back and forth from our box to the neighbor's. I think we have three people on the same line. No dial tone on the phone by Friday night.
SATURDAY;
We went about our morning, and I wound up planting almost all of the rest of my annuals in mud. We'd gotten so much rain, even one and a half days of no rain and some sun did not dry us out. While I was out in the swamp, I heard someone driving back and forth. My husband came out to tell me that the phone guy was out there working on the phone again. Good. I was worried, since I never got a message saying my problem lie inside the house not inside.
1:50PM
I had taken a shower to get the grime off me from planting in the mud. A knock came to the door. We knew it would be the technician. It was and I went to speak with him. He asked me to check for a dial tone.
I did. Oh, I was so happy to hear it!!!
I went back to the young man at the door with a tan shirt that had Frontier embroidered over his heart. His face was flushed from the heat. I told him it was back up.
He said good, that the people just down the way (the Hunts), and the lady up the street, had both lost their computers. And the Hunts had a surge protector. I told him, I had unplugged that phone from the computer the night before we had those storms.
He went on to say that the lines under ground had been fried. "I don't know where it hit, but-"
"Here!" I said. And I told him what all we lost. I was taking in the fact that everyone else had lost their computer. I hadn't even known they were on dial up, but then they probably can't use anything else. I don't know.
I was prepared to call both the phone people and my Internet people to cancel, if the problem was inside the house--because they'd charge us for it. I would then write a letter to Shelly Arkon and tell her the news and ask her to keep me in her thoughts. I was prepared for the worse.
I've been living by a shoe string with this Internet thing, and so forth. If it or my computer goes I'm up the creek. The oven and light will be replaced (courtesy of the forest preserve who owns the house). My computer might have been fried, but wasn't. We might have been fried, but weren't.
Yeah, you just have to be grateful for all that you have, the bumps you get through in life, and also for being so damned lucky!
