Most of us, though not all, have had our share of lots of rain, storms and or tornadoes. One or the other and combinations too. We have been fortunate this season in that we have not had tornadoes in our area. We did, however, have a couple of serious thunderstorms! One which blew through at about 2:30 AM.
Like the earthquakes in California, I have also become conditioned to harsh, booming thunder, that shakes the house and makes the windows rattle. Upon occasion, I have even witnessed it hit the ground or fire huge snapping thunder bolts into the pine woods behind our house.
This particular storm was different in that I was awake and bumbling about in the kitchen and dining area at that wee hour of the morning. I heard the storm, but wasn’t concerned until it BOOMED right outside our dinning room windows! On the tail of the boom, there was an almost immediate explosion over the kitchen sink! One of the overhead sink lights was gone out. Just one, but it sounded like an M80 when it went, and right as I was walking by the sink. I shrieked of course, and then quickly ran to the dining room door to turn on the backyard flood lights. Nothing happened. I tried the dinning room lights. Nothing.
Bob came in and checked the breaker box and found the thrown breaker. Resetting it fixed the problem. Crisis averted I thought, but no…
Later that day we tried to turn on the television in the dinning room and it wouldn’t turn on. Bob checked the breaker box and nothing else had been tripped. “Strange”, he said.
Further investigation revealed that the signal booster, television, cables into the TV and out of the TV and into the computer that provided the feed to the TV, and ultimately the computer itself, were all fried! Later we would find out that the standing TV antenna out by the corner of the house had been hit.
That is what acted as a lightning rod and fed the electricity into the house via the coaxial and into all our equipment. And, most thankfully, not our house.
Just like this
The bold black line is the path of the coaxial from the TV antenna to the computer
I also discovered in the morning, that a monster oak in the neighbors pasture had taken a direct hit too!
LOL! I never noticed until this moment how much of an accent I have picked up after 16 years in Alabama. No doubt some of my Cali friends will get a big laugh out of this.
And then this week we have discovered that one of the flood lights was toasted at the base as well. Only one, not both, though both are in the same fixture.
What else may we find as time goes by? Hopefully that was all of it.
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Over then next few weeks I would like to catch you up on what other things have been going on here. Some within the last year and some even longer into the past. Title form will look something like this: RE (whatever): so this is what happened (some time frame from the past).
Life on the Farmlet 