Friday, January 11, 2008

Make It Rain

Or rather let it stop. I know that we are in the midst of a drought and everything, but I need this rain to cease. For the last 3 days its been raining Fidos and Mittens at night. Ordinarily, I could care less about some precipitation, but now its starting to affect me personally. What am I talking about? I'll tell you.

Tuesday night, not only did it rain, but there was a storm. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and rain came down like a harbinger to Noah to build his ark. I was at work when it started and after a particularly treacherous ride home, all I wanted to do was plop down in the living room and watch the second episode of The Wire on HBO On Demand. I turned on my computer, which is always the first thing I do when I come home, and pointed the remote at the TV. The cable box came on, but no picture. I went over to the tv, and tried to turn it on, but no haps. I unplugged and replugged the TV in, but still no picture. Turns out that the lightning strikes fried the television. I don't know how it happened since it was in a surge protector, but it happened. Damn storms. The next morning, as I switched out the TV with a smaller spare TV I had, I realized something else. The DVD player was acting up too. It was turning on and off by itself. Apparently, the electronics in the DVD player was messed up too. There is a DVD in the player, that will not come out because whenever I hit eject, it just keeps loading. That also was in the surge protector, so either a very strong lightning strike hit, or the surge protector is just a piece of crap.

Wednesday, it was raining again. No storms to speak of, just heavy rain. As I got home from work, again, I turned on the computer. I read a few blogs, started writing a post, then went to fix something to eat. When I got back to finish my post, I noticed that I couldn't save it. The cable connection wasn't working. I tried the TV and of course, the weather had knocked out that service too. There I was, sitting there with no internet and no TV, all because of some rain. I just put in a DVD and fell asleep. As I awoke from my power nap around 730, I saw the cable crews working on the pole outside my window. I didn't even hit me to write the post in Word, and then transfer it to Blogger when the internet came back until it was already time to go to work. The cable was back on, but no post for yesterday.

That brings me to tonight. It rained again tonight. At first it was not that bad, but as if on cue, it started coming down on my ride home from work. I get off work at 1 in the morning, and there is usually nobody on the roads with me. Tonight, however, there must have been an 18 wheeler convention, cuz they were all over the place. I was driving slow as hell, trying to see where I was going. The truck drivers took this as a sign to drive next to me and spray me with the moisture from their tires. It was ridiculous. It was already hard enough to see without them barrelling down on me and cutting closely in front of me. To top it off, I hit a puddle on I 285 and nearly started hydroplaning. I was so glad to finally get off the highway and out of the rain.

There's no rain in the forecast in the next couple of days, so maybe I'll get a break. I know we need the rain, but does it have to come all in spurts? I don't really feel like dealing with it for a while.