Voo Doo, Omens, and the Devil

Well, I was going to post one piece of good news/progress, but I see Jared has beat me to it by posting pictures of our "lawn feature."
So here is the latest. I feel like I should start my posts with "once upon a time" these days. Monday afternoon it was looking like rain, but big deal, it rains all the time this time of year. I was at Marvin's getting grout sealer for the shower when a little ligtning storm came through. Jared called to inform me that lightning had struck the house and got the computer and all things plugged into that power strip. Great--what can I do about it at Marvin's??? So I get home and I'm sealing the grout when I realized I was going to need more. I sent Jared to run back to Marvin's, but he came back in the house and said that the truck wouldn't start and all of the lights inside and out were on--including all of the lights on the dash. And the big pine tree beside the truck looked as if someone had stripped off a bunch of the bark all the way down. Apparently lightning had also struck our truck after it came down the tree. Great. We called State farm and got that ball rolling. A little later in the afternoon we noticed that it was a little warm in the house, so Jared went to "bump" the A/C down. No A/C. The ligtning got it too. The only good news so far is that it didn't get the computer, but all of the other stuff that was plugged in with it--cable modem, and the apple airport (our wireless network). I worked Monday night, so about the time we were trying to deal with that and feed Porter, I had to go to work. Jared got the A/C man to come out and look at it, and said that he could order parts early Tuesday morning and have them installed Tuesday afternoon. Jared and Porter stayed at my parent's house while they are in Alaska on vacation. I would rather be in Alaska too than in our house without A/C. Tuesday morning I turned all the fans on high and it was at least tolerable for me to take a nap, but by Tuesday afternoon it was miserable. Porter and I went to Catherine's soccer practice for some cool air--ha! We went home briefly to get clothes and went back to Mama's. No A/C man ever showed up. This morning I called and the part is supposed to be here by lunch today and it will be installed this afternoon. The truck was picked up by Enterprise Toyota yesterday afternoon and I hope they are busy at work on it. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is going to come pick me up this afternoon and drive me back to Enterprise to pick out a rental. So much for a relaxing week to recoup from my shift work hell of last week. Oh, and when we went to put all the shower fixtures on after the grout was sealed we found out that one of the parts didn't fit and we have had to order the right part, which is supposed to also be in by lunch today.