Lightning Strikes…
… or 42.6 Kbps on the dialup connection… whoo hoo!
Well, we got hit by lightning late yesterday afternoon. Well, not us, thankfully, but our house.
It came and smacked the front of the house, about 20 feet from the window I was sitting at, at one of the corners of our hexagon-ish walls, came in and attacked a light fixture in our hallway and ran down the ground into listening room two, melting the ground and ‘hot’ wires together, and blew out the light switches across the room so that 30 feet away the Kharmas now have light-switch-pieces in front of them.
It looks like we lost 4 TVs, the ovens, Neli’s computer š , my computer’s networking, the Nordost Vidar cable burner, ….
We also lost cable and phone, though the phone is now working (the 4 wires just melted at the box outside so it was an easy fix).
The Coltrane Supreme system works, the small Audio Note system was unplugged, the rack with the Walker and M10 was unplugged. The rest – well, I am a little trepidatious about testing it all out – but Neli is game…
We were lucky. In a lot of ways.
None of the systems were ‘on’ – because we’ve been getting so many lightning storms this week, we got tired of turning things off and on and off and on. But we had grown lax, just turning things off, not unplugging them like we usually do. Oops.
Funny, this lightning storm gave little or no warning. Usually the thunder gets louder and Louder and LOUDER until we can’t stand the suspense and turn everything off and unplug it.
This time, it was like nothing… distant rumbles… BLAM! and then it was over.
So anyway, cable is out (i.e. broadband network connectivity). Neither of our main computers can talk to the net anymore, even if the cable was working. I am typing this on our ‘out-of-town show reporting laptop’, which is OK but not sufficient for a whole show report. We got a Mac somewhere – but that’ll be worse (no photoshop on it, for one, and an even smaller keyboard).
And guess what? We have a show tomorrow. CEDIA 2007.
So, the plan is to transfer photos to my main computer, process them, the put them on DVD and transfer them to this laptop, which hopefully will upload them over the cable, that will be working sometime soon, we hope.
Well, I guess that there will be fewer pictures during the show and until we get computers that are both capable of processing several gigabytes of JPEGs …and … connecting to the net.
Maybe we’ll also post a few photos of the smoked switches and boards hanging off the side of the house – but I think you all understand now why there aren’t any in THIS post.
But seriously, we were lucky. Especially me, who was sitting in the symetrical location in the window across from the strike. And the house did not catch fire. And the circuit breaker blew after the first leg of the circuit melted, trapping the major damage to the hallway circuit. All of the equipment was off, (except the Vidar) and lots unplugged.
So, fingers crossed, hopefully the rest of the gear is AOK.
Kind of messes with your head, this stuff does…
Anway, next post: CEDIA 2007!
