Austin Blues

The weather here has been very interesting lately. It will rain, then the sun will come out, then the sky will cloud over, then it will be sunny, then it will rain again. All within minutes or hours.

Last weekend, we were eating outside, enjoying the bright blue sky to our left and right, but then noticed a dark cloud directly above our heads. A cloud that dropped some rain, then exited quickly.

We have heard that if you don't enjoy Austin's weather at any time, you should just wait 5 minutes. Because after 5 minutes, the weather will be something completely different - which you may love or hate more.

That has certainly been true recently.

This unpredictable stormy weather has been causing us problems. We've been caught without an umbrella on a number of occasions. And most recently our ethernet card was fried by a lightning strike. (At least that is what we are guessing at the moment. We still have to test further.)

This particular lighting strike scared me to death. It was accompanied by a loud crack of thunder. And created such racket in my apartment that I jumped out of my chair. All the smoke detectors in the house began screeching at the same time.

I didn't know how I would get them to stop, since they were not reacting to smoke I could fan away. How does one air lightning out of the house?

Luckily, the detectors settled down without any intervention on my part. But our DSL connection unfortunately did not return to normal.

After a long troubleshooting conversation with an AT&T Tech, we were told that we really should turn off and unplug our computer and peripherals (including the DSL modem) whenever there is a thunderstorm.

Which sounds like very good advice for an area with less erratic weather. Here, in Austin, I honestly often don't know that a thunderstorm has arrived until I hear a loud crack of thunder. And sometimes there is only the one crack before the storm moves out and the skies are sunny again.

If I were to follow the tech's advice, I would be unplugging and restarting my computer all day. My Mac starts up and shuts down fairly quickly, but these freak Austin thunderstorms are speedy too. There's a good possibility that the lighting might breeze through before I could shut down or in the middle of starting up.

I think that investing in more powerful surge protectors might be a better idea for a volatile weather area like Austin.

So, we'll be in the market for those at the same time that we restore our DSL.

And I will be on vacation from slow dial-up blogging until our DSL is lightning-proof and up and running again.

Hope your weather is pleasant and predictable! I'll post again soon!