"It Was A Dark And Stormy Night..."

Saturday night through Sunday morning we experienced heavy thunderstorms. They just seemed to stall right over Creston. In addition to nearly five inches of rain, we had beau coup lightning followed by loud thunder claps. The house of a friend across town was struck by lightning. Our only damage seemed to be a chunk taken out of the plastic molding on the corner of the house. (Now repaired by white duct tape.) We think the neighbor's bird house became a projectile and hit it.

I should say that appeared to be the only damage until I tried getting online. The computer booted up o.k. but every web page I tried to access displayed the above message. And, guess what? No phone service. A call (thank goodness for those cell phones we have in case of emergency) to the phone/Internet service provider confirmed what we suspected - a plethora of outages in our area due to the storm. "Should have you back on in about an hour", they said.

When three hours later we were still without service, another call was placed. We were told the area outage had been fixed so we would have to wait until Wednesday morning when a repair person would come to our house between 8:00 a.m. and noon. WHAT!!!???

Let's just say I understand the term withdrawal. How many times did I go to the computer to check e-mail and facebook? Even Kathy Reichs and Alexander McCall Smith (authors of the two books I was reading) couldn't comfort me enough. Ice cream didn't help and I didn't have any wine in the house. Woe is me.

Bud likes to remind me that I was once the one who didn't think we needed a computer. "What would we use a computer for?" I asked. That was in 1999. I finally agreed we could get one but I thought we should wait until after January 1, 2000 - Y2K scares, remember?

Even after we got the first computer I didn't use it much except to play Freecell. Internet access was through dial-up. Just getting on-line took forever. Once on, I would double click on a page I wanted and then go do something else for five minutes until it loaded. Times and computers changed. My habits changed right along with them.

I made it through Sunday, finally; but imagining all day that someone was trying to call us or contact us through the Internet. Monday morning was just as bad. I was more than a little dejected; grouchy is a word which might have applied.

Monday afternoon while trying to distract myself by reading AND watching a rerun of one of the HGTV programs, there was a knock on the door. The cavalry had arrived! Two, not one, but two Mediacom techs were outside. It took them awhile, but we were finally back in touch with the world! They went on down the street to rescue someone else.

I went to facebook to check out homecoming pics of two granddaughters. Right in the middle of viewing, the "cannot display the webpage" message came up again. "Bud, quick! Go see if those guys are still out there!" They apologized for not telling us they might have to shut our service off again for a few minutes. Whew!

I'm so glad we didn't have to wait until Wednesday. And this morning we replaced the phone and answering machine that got zapped. We're back in business and I couldn't be happier.