I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t like thunderstorms, so when one rolled through Gainesville on Friday night, I made a point to keep an eye on the sky.
A lot of friends tell me their dogs are afraid of thunderstorms, but I don’t have that problem. As the thunder rumbled outside, Milly, the liver and white springer spaniel who lives at my house, curled up and napped at my feet.
I was the basket case. I’ve always been afraid of storms. I think it goes back to when I was kid and “The Wizard of Oz” was on TV. It was bad enough to think a tornado could pick up your house and toss it in the air. But who wants to land in place with Munchkins; scarecrows, tin men and lions that talk; witches that come and go in a burst of flames; and, worst of all, flying monkeys.
Those flying monkeys scared by bejeesus out of me. Even today, if I see a monkey in a zoo, I keep a close eye on him. Just in case.
Fortunately with this particular storm, there was no tornado. Unfortunately, there was thunder and lightning. Lots and lots of it.
I have friends who love to sit on their front porches and watch as thunderstorms roll through.
They say things to me such as, “Why are you afraid of thunder? Thunder won’t hurt you.”
I know thunder won’t hurt me, but lightning might. Lightning is sneaky.
“The safest place to be during a lightning storm is your car,” they say. The theory here, I suppose, is that the rubber tires on the car will ground the lightning and keep it from getting to you.
As a result of this theory, I’ve decided to never leave my house during thunderstorm season without carrying along a tire.
I particularly hate thunderstorms at night, when I’m in bed trying to sleep and the lightning creates a strobe effect in my bedroom. Maybe I watched too many reruns of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but I’m always afraid a vampire is going to step out of the darkness just as the lightning flashes and get me.
When it’s lightning at night, I always turn on a lamp and try to have a wooden stake nearby, just in case.
I’ve always been told that you can tell me how far away a thunderstorm is by counting the seconds between the flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder. The number of seconds is the number of miles away the storm is. On Friday night, there was no time between the flash and the rumble. The storm was right over me.
The lights blinked off for a second, just enough time to reset my clocks and turn off the TV. Fortunately, I didn’t take a direct hit. But lightning did come in through the phone line, over which I get my internet service and my television service. The modem was fried.
I called my service provider and was told it would be 72 hours before a technician could come out of fix my problem. That meant I had to go the whole weekend without the ability to watch TV or surf the Internet.
So I spent a long weekend reading, doing laundry, cleaning the apartment – and not watching the Wimbledon finals or the Braves games. The repairman didn’t arrive until late Monday night.
And now I have another reason to hate lightning.
