The Joys of Florida Thunderstorms

I'm sitting here at the house, and I finally have internet service again. Two days ago we had a bad thunderstorm roll in the area, and it messed up a lot of my electronics (computer was surge protected with battery back up... THANK GOD!)

My friend and I had spent a day by the pool drinking beer, and when the weather turned ominous, we came inside to play Guitar Hero. We were right in the middle of a song, and suddenly there was a deafening crack accompanied by a flash of blue light, and we immediately lost power.

It took awhile to get the tv back on, but when we finally did, I realized that I no longer had cable (or internet). I did all the rebooting of the box and unplugging/waiting/replugging in of the modem, but to no avail.

As annoying as that was, it pales in comparison to the fact that all of the circuit boards for my pool pump and indoor control panel were fried. The service guy just left, and it cost almost $2600 to replace everything.

My Maytag dryer no longer functions, so I'll find out the extent of the damage on Monday when the tech guy arrives. And it was only 10 minutes ago that I realized my fax machine has given up the ghost.

As an aside, and completely unrelated to the lightning strike, I spent the night at a friend's last night, and when I came home this morning I discovered that one of the animals (the cat, I think) went apesh*t and shredded my fitted sheet and bit chunks out of my memory foam mattress topper. WTF? WHY?????

June is turning out to be an expensive month for me.