It's been kinda stormy around here the past week and a half. Beautiful heat lightning storms, morning-long downpours, a couple of freak thunderstorm pop-ups now and again.
Last Saturday we had one of the freak ones. I wasn't slated to work until 7:30 that morning (which is usual for Saturdays), so I only got up shortly after dawn. Looked kinda grey outside, maybe a little moist, so when I got to work I rolled the windows up just for safety.
Probably about 9:00 am it came down a trash-mover and a gully-washer. All us in the store were like o_o. Then in another hour and a half it's gone.
I get home to find huge chunks of tree bark all over the yard. Turns out lightning had struck the old oak tree we have in our front yard, which sits about three or four feet from the south-western corner of our house—where my bedroom is. Came in on a high-up branch, ran all the way down into the ground. I could see burn marks all the way down the tree trunk, and a good section of one of the thicker limbs had simply exploded.
Our next door neighbor was picking up bits of bark from all the way on the other side of his house, on the property line on that side.
We also found a small robin who had been sitting on a branch at the time. He was missing most of his feathers and looked ready to serve with a nice rosemary braise. We found his head about six feet away. Pop.
Anyway, the lightning strike blew out the television and VCR in the upstairs master bedroom (directly above my room), along with the whole cable box, our PC's ethernet card, and the low voltage side of our air conditioner's electronic stuff—meaning we had no heat for the next few weeks.
Gee.
That was the only real damage inside the house, though; almost all of the breakers got tripped and shut off, including the breaker in my window-AC unit's electrical plug. Both the cable guy and the HVAC guy arrived within minutes of me getting home, which came as a nice surprise for me, so that got taken care of lickety-split. We called the tree people about removing the oak tree, since it's mostly dead and pretty well constitutes a damage hazard to the house—my parents have been leaving it for years, hoping an errant limb (of which there are many) would crash onto one of our vehicles and let us graduate out of the POS class of automobile—and the cost for removing the tree and grinding the stump out comes to about $1,200, which is considerably more than the $500 the insurance company approved for us. So my father is going to be getting businesslike with them shortly.
Went out to buy a new ethernet card. No big deal, yeah? PCI ethernet cards are in stock usually at Office Max and at any local computer retail/repair/parts store. So we buy one, come home, replace....
...and then I find out that this computer's ethernet card was a PCI Express slot.
Really?
(Incidentally, that response is the same one the computer guy at our local computers&games store gave me when I told him. Flabbergastation all around.)
I mean, hurray for modernisation and keeping up with the advancing technology and all, but, you know ... I'm sorry, but that was just stupid. The only PCI2 ethernet cards around are sold at hard-to-get-to stores (unless you live in prosperous cities) or on the internet, and if you can't get on the internet to order the part....
Anyway. I did some quick research, got data on the part we needed so either my father could order it from work or one of the other of us could order it from our local library. However, he's meanwhile already latched onto the idea of a ethernet-to-USB adaptor—which, don't get me wrong, is pretty slick. The only problem is we don't have a lot of USB ports on this computer (for whatever reason; stupid HP only giving you four in back and two in front, come on), and since we're having to order this part off the internet anyway, we might as well just get the dadgum PCI2 card, you know?
But, no, he wants to get this one. Mostly because it's his idea, and overtly because (and I quote) "there's more versatility this way; we can plug it in to the old computer without too much hassle."
Um.
The old computer uses a regular PCI ethernet card.
Which we have. (Two, actually; the one inside it still works, even.)
So....
Whatever.
Long story short, lightning is awesome and blows up trees with a melee touch attack, nobody died (except that robin), and we have now successfully returned to the status quo.
Except that I had to reset the ethernet adaptor today because it was plugged in when the PC was turned on and didn't get properly initialised. Wtf.
