Out with A Bang

 

I'm not usually a bloggy type person.  Let's be honest, I don't think I ever made more than 15 posts on my live journal, and my FB statuses tend to be "here's a picture, bye".

But a lot has been going on around here, and y'all saved my butt, so I feel like I need to tell the whole story.

Ok, imagine.  My family and I are having a nice evening at home.  My husband (G) is cooking dinner, the kids and I are playing computer games (I'm playing Microtopia, it's fun, you should try it....BUT I DIGRESS).

It's storming outside, but it's a Florida summer evening ending in "day", so that is to be expected.  Though it is a little heavier than usual, and our street is getting a little flooded:

 

Cue the loudest boom I have EVER heard, rattling the windows, including bright flashes of light from inside the kitchen.

Everything flickers for a second, then comes back.  

Umm, what the heck was that?

Look around, and discover that all of the LED lightbulbs in my kitchen have turned to toast:

Ok, that sucks.  Then, the kids start complaining because they can't get to their games.  If you have kids, you know the wifi being down is a violation of the Geneva convention.  

My husband (the electrical engineer), goes and reboots everything, still nothing.  Decided that the cable modem probably got fried, and tells the kids to go read until tomorrow so we can go fix it.

Head outside, and discover that my direct next door neighbors house was actually HIT by the lightning.  You can see where it entered the palm tree in front of their house.

G to the rescue, as our neighbors son is home alone and freaking out trying to get the generator set up--turns out the lightning caused the MAIN breaker on their house to trip, so he was able to at least get power back to their fridge.  They don't have internet either.

Next day, head to spectrum to get a new modem.  Replace the modem, still nothing.  Well, damn.

Make an appointment with the cable company to get the main box looked at.  See that our neighbors have a tech out, throw ourselves on his mercy to get him to look at our internet as well.

Every SINGLE WIRE SPLICE in the entire run of cable is destroyed.  Fried to a crisp.  I wish I'd taken pictures, it was EPIC.  The poor tech spent 3 hours replacing every single splice, with my nine year old following him around going "is it fixed yet?  Is it fixed yet? Is it fixed yet?"

Ok, internet back, hooray!

Next day (3 days after the ligtning), I'm working in the garage when the water heater (which is right next to where I sit when I'm winding yarn), makes a loud BANG, then starts beeping incessantly.   Look over, and I'm getting a really weird error message:

Call my husband in a panic, because it's beeping every 2 minutes in an ear piercing sort of way.  End up turning the thing off at the breaker, just to make it shut up.

Engineer gets home from work, tries to bypass the heat pump, no go.  So, the heater is dead, yet another casualty of the lighting.

New water heater is $1800.  Not the kind of money that we have just sitting around.

So, I turned to all of you!  Posted on socials, begging for y'all to buy some yarn so we could buy the new heater without having to put it on credit.

And y'all.  Y'ALL.  You came through in SPADES!  In less than a week, you made enough purchases for me to replace the water heater.

And, because I'm married to an engineer, he was able to get the new one installed asap:

With the help of my uncle, who basically renovated his own house.

So, now I have hot water again, most of the lightbulbs have been replaced, the internet is still being weird (something is still half broken).

It's nuts.  But thanks to all of you, it's going to be a funny story, not a horrible disaster.

And I really can't thank you enough for that.