Ree’s musings

It’s technically early morning for me as I write this, so it was last night when thunderstorms, golf-ball—sized hail, and threat of tornadoes all spun through my fair town. The hail sounded like a fleet of angry pixies beating the snot out of the walls, like Tinkerbell in the throes of ‘roid rage. Awesome.

When the storms had begun, I shut down my computer and unplugged its surge protector, ensuring that no lightning strike could travel down the wire and damage my lovely Helen. After the storms cleared, I plugged it back in.

People, I am not exaggerating even a tiny bit when I say that it threw up sparks and an audible pop. I screamed a little bit and dropped the thing like it could burn me, because I thought it probably could.

This is probably the time that the clock plugged into that outlet abruptly stopped displaying time, and the light in the bathroom spontaneously went out.

Luckily my brother helped me out, or I would still be pitifully questioning why everything has to go wrong at once. In this case, it went wrong together because it all came from a single cause, simple as that.

My brother insists that the faulty surge protector smells like smoke and fail. He’s not wrong. As he reminded me, it smells very like the used caps from the cap guns my brothers had, years ago.

He had fun tearing the thing apart with a knife and wire cutters, to prevent anyone from mistakenly using plugging it in again.

Everything is fixed or replaced now. If I can just get some sleep, I’ll have had a decent day.