Holy Cow...on Friday July 20th while sitting in the studio talking to JP on the phone a huge lightning bolt hit so close to my house that I actually thought it had hit the house!! The noise from it was deafening and I hung up the phone and immediately searched the house for the smell of smoke or fire!

I discovered my cable was out so called Brighthouse right away...they said there were no other reports of outage from my area so they would send a tech out tomorrow between 1-2pm.

It was really weird to be with out computer and tv...so I worked in studio and caught up on some art and worked in my journal.

The tech arrived right on time and just as he rang the doorbell another huge storm came complete with driving rain, howling winds, and of course lots of lightning. He braved the bad weather, however, donned a rain suit and umbrella and fixed the cable.

We then discovered that the lightning had fried basically ALL of my Tv's, two phones and answer machine, computer, dvd players, refrigerator in garage, and washing machine!!!!

I was totally freaked out and overwhelmed -- what no computer????? I could live with out TV but not to have my computer was simply too much to bear.

Called my son, Scott, and we decided the fastest thing to do was simply to go buy another computer rather than have him try to build one for me. So that afternoon I met him at Circuit City and I got a HP Pavilion computer,VTech Answer Machine with speaker phone on handset, and a UPS Battery Backup unit.

I had packed the fried computer in the car so Scott to both machines to his house, added a DVD drive, and copied the files from the zapped computer to the new one.

Don't know what I would do with out my wonderful computer wizard son-- he has saved me so many times!!!

I picked up the new computer on Sunday...got it all set up and it worked great with the exception that Microsoft Vista is NOT compatible with my external backup drive- -Acronis software--- which I am not at all happy about as I discovered I have to buy the new version which is another $50.00..... total bummer.

This has been a total nerve wracking experience and one I sure don't want to experience again .... The whole thing is really weird as I did have surge protectors hooked up to some of the equipment and they still got fried. Scott told me that they basically don't work that well and he is the one who suggested that I go on and buy a UPS backup.

Now comes the time consuming job of installing all the software- ugh ugh -- not looking forward to that for sure!!