MONSOON STORM REACTIONS

Here's the way the monsoon moved through our neighborhood yesterday for the second day in a row.

Once again there was thunder, lightning, torrential rain, some hail and water flowing in the street.

Muggles and Blackwell weathered the storm under the coffee table with their two humans.

Well, the two humans weren't under there but they were close at hand.

There was about a 55 minute power outage later when an electrical   transformer blew out, down the hill from us. A guy who I spent considerable time with today told me he was driving by when it blew and the light was as bright as the sun for a few seconds. Then it died down and he noticed lights in nearby stores flickering.

I spent quite a bit of time with him today because he was repairing my computer at his business. The power surge, apparently related to the transformer blowing, took out the power supply in my computer. He replaced that but when I got home I couldn't get the cordless optical mouse to work. After a couple of hours of fooling with it I finally went back to the repair shop and his assistant learned that the surge had also blown out all four USB ports in the computer. So, after a lot of hours of frustrating computer dealing and spending too much money that I don't have, I am finally back in business.

I will take his advice though. He said many people who have lost power supplies due to lightning strikes say "but I had it plugged into a surge protector."

He says if lightning can travel 12 miles in a second it can easily jump a little quarter inch gap in a surge protector. His advice? When a storm is imminent, unplug the computer from the wall. In future, I shall and I relay his advice to those of you in storm country.

Right, cats?

"Right on, daddy-o"