What Now

In honor of the new "Transformers" movie coming both to DVD and to the SpaceDome IMAX theater, the transformer outside of our house decided to explode in the wee hours of the morning.

Once again I awoke at some ungodly hour for no apparent reason, and just as I was slipping off to sleep again (an unusual event) I heard a weird crackling noise and a beeping sound. Thinking Steve's computer was about to go into melt down, I woke him up so that he could go and save it if he needed to. However, he said he had turned his computer off, so that couldn't have been what it was. So we went on to excuse number 2, which is that the noise was the weather alert thingie. We flipped on the TV to see if we were about to be blown away, but there was nothing on any of the local channels about the weather. Trust me, if lightening strikes anywhere in the Tennessee Valley, at least one of our news channels breaks into regularly scheduled programming and lets us know. So we turned that off and started to go back to sleep again. Then the weird crackling sound and the beeping began again, so we got up to see what was going on and the sound we heard was the battery backup Steve has installed for the warp core - ahem, I mean - his computer system. It was stuttering and blinking, and then suddenly all of the lights we had on were stuttering and blinking. Of course, we had no idea about the transformer committing suicide at the time, so we ran around turning off all of the computers and other such electronic items that would suffer from such abuse. Once that was done, I went back to bed and watched the overhead light have a seizure for about a minute or so. Of course, in the semi-crazytown mindset I was in, my first thought was "Dad?" Then Steve called me to come look at something and he showed me the transformer right outside our house spitting sparks and fire. Um...yikes. So he went off to call the utility people and I watched it as it hissed and sparked and finally died in a ball of blue-white fire. Of course, then our tiny section of the neighborhood went black. Nice. It was a grand total of about five houses on our street without power. So Steve finally gets the dispatcher on the phone and says, totally calm "Yeah, the transformer by our house is on fire." Apparently, if you want prompt attention, the word "Fire" does the trick. Since I couldn't take a bath or anything until the power came back on, I called into work and told them I wouldn't be in until our power issues were resolved and then promptly fell asleep again. Sometime while I snoozed, the power dudes came and restored power! Go Huntsville Utility! Of course, I slept much longer than I meant to and I was planning on leaving work early to take care of some business, so now it doesn't do much good to go in. Meh, I'll just go in on Saturday and make up for it this weekend. : )