CMI Columnist

This week’s column is supercharged.

That’s right I’m composing it on a computer that was struck by lightning. Sparks are flying from my fingertips as I write and jagged adjectives are flying across the screen like vivid thunderbolts.

I don’t like thunder and lightning. My wife hates it and has been known to hide in the closet with all the pets when it’s storming. Last week’s cloudburst caught us by surprise though. Looking through the window I was amazed as it suddenly looked like a giant bucket had been turned upside down somewhere in the heavens above.

Immediately I thought that maybe this was the big drought-breaker — the moment when Mother Nature finally turned the tables and the little one, "El Nino," came to visit.

I had the urge to rush to the computer and check out the radar to see how much rain was coming. I used to just look to the west to see what was coming, but these days I have technology and it had to be consulted.

I immediately found out that with the drought my wife had lost her edge. She was not hiding in the closet as the storm bore down on us, she was at the computer and appeared to be shopping for shoes.

I wrestled the mouse away from her while leaning across her shoulder and began to navigate to the Weather Underground site. At just that moment a clap of thunder that would work great for getting sinners attention on Judgment Day rocked my home. A brilliant flash struck the little Internet router box behind the computer popped and I screamed like a little girl and dove under the desk where my usually slow moving wife was already waiting for me.

After the lights came back on and the smoke detector quieted a few seconds later we emerged to assess the damage. Televisions all came back on, computer rebooted and other appliances returned to apparently normal function. All that is except the Internet boxes.

The next day the geek on-call from the local Internet provider soon set things right with the equipment attached to the garage wall but when I arrived home later the computer still wouldn’t connect. I hauled it in and soon the whole geek crew was scratching their heads and various other parts of their anatomy over my writing and weather prognostication machine. Apparently it will never function exactly right again.

Things are patched up for the time being but now the lightning bolt adjectives like the cloud cover on the radar website have dissipated.

Could be the drought visited on our parched Earth or the one this columnist suffers from hasn’t left after all.

Karl Terry, a former publisher of the Quay County Sun, writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]