A Shocking October Night

Friday scared the dickens out of me. Yes, it did, and it wasn’t even Friday the 13th. However, the weather, and the events, proved to me that perhaps any October that has a Friday the 13th in it is a month that should be avoided.

The day started dark and wet. I’d expected rain because the night before our fearless weatherman had forecast this and he is only wrong 75% of the time. So, I figured this was his day to be right.

By the middle of the afternoon the winds had picked up a little, as expected, and I was feeling as if life were going along normally.

Then shortly after 4 PM the rain started coming down in buckets. Even Fritz and Greta didn’t want to go out in that mess. We all hunkered down, dry and warm inside, that is, all but Hubby, who decided he should go out and clear the ditch on the side of our driveway.

I was killing time on the laptop computer when I heard a low, distant rumbling. It was thunder! I quickly went to the office and shut down the computers in there, came back to the family room and shut down the satellite dish. I was just turning to take care of a few more things when….. BOOM!!!!!

I jumped out of my skin! The lightning bolt had apparently hit quite close. I raced down the stairs to the garage so I could drive the car up the hill to get Hubby, but when I opened the door to the garage he was standing there sopping wet! Again I was startled!

We came back upstairs and watched and listened to the storm as it passed over us. What a brutal, violent storm it was. We could hear the wind roaring, and see the lake disappear from view due to the heavy rain.

Eventually the storm passed by. we ate dinner and then settled down to work on our computers. However, neither one of us could get online. I called tech support for our ISP and spoke with them. They could see that the cable modem was working correctly, but they couldn’t see the router! My brand new router!!! Fried! Gone in the prime of it’s young life! I had quickly shut down the computers and forgotten to turn off the router! I still had my old router so I connected that and got the system back up and running.

Hubby called our neighbor and found out that the lightening had hit their house! They’d had balls of fire running across the ceiling and a broken widow from the event! I knew it was close their house is only 100 feet away!

By 8 PM, the wind was really blowing hard. We have an anemometer, so we can read the wind speed here on our end of the lake. The wind was blowing so hard it sounded like a freight train was going through the family room. The peak gust recorded at 63 miles an hour!

It was just about this time that I started to work on Princess, and Hubby went into the office to work on his computer, when the lights went out!

Of course the laptop stayed on and gave me enough light to find a match and light a candle. Hubby got out his camping lamp and when we decided that the lights weren’t coming back on any time soon, we got the generator out and Hubby got it running. This gave us heat, water, and lights in our family room and bedroom. So while all of our area sat in darkness, we were able to watch TV.

In the light of day today, we picked up the apples off the grass where they had been blown off the trees. There are the remains of a wooden dock now resting at the town beach below us, and there are more brightly colored leaves on my patio than there are left on the trees. We also heard that another house in town was hit by lightning, and that three people were injured as a result of this strike.

This morning we removed all the window air conditioners, which means that summer is really over for us here. Tonight Mr. Weatherman announced we will get some snow on Monday!

So much for global warming!