Tripped up by technology and Mother Nature!

To an indoor cycling instructor, iTunes is your lifeblood. When it crashes, all heck breaks loose. That happened to me on Friday, and then on Monday, lightning struck. Literally! Let me tell you about my crazy week–I’ve been a little preoccupied! Friday my iTunes froze up. I wasn’t even able to access any of my songs before I’d get the pinwheel of death. This happened over and over and over when I was in the middle of trying to do two profiles for ICA–one was my final stage for the Tour de France package, and the other is my next Audio Master Class. If you’re like me, your iTunes is your lifeblood (or whatever method you use to organize your music). I spent many hours over the weekend on the phone with Apple tech support, and at least we found a temporary fix so I could do my Tour de France profile (which I posted this weekend–my apologies to anyone waiting for it, but I know you’ll love it)! Apparently my iTunes library is corrupted and over the next few days we (the Apple tech support guy and me) will be migrating my entire library of almost 15K songs to a new library. That may take 24 hours to do. Cross fingers that it works seamlessly!

Then on Monday, I was gone most of the day in Denver picking someone up from the airport (a 2.5-hour drive), and came home to wailing alarms, flashing clocks, most of the power out (breakers tripped), no telephone, and other electrical system malfunctions. Apparently our house was hit by lightning. Yes, lightning! The neighbors saw it hit the small hill across the street, then it flared laterally and hit several houses. Ours had the worst damage. It is now three days later and only this afternoon do I have internet. One of our routers was completely fried, and the exterior telephone system as well. My husband has his business out of our house as well, and fortunately his server was spared by the surge protector. We thought our refrigerator was completely kaput, but they were able to fix it the next day.

The worst thing was that my two kitties were completely traumatized! Poor little guys, you can imagine the tremendously loud explosive sound, followed by over three hours of alarms going off before I came home. One cat, Galibier, spent almost two days shivering in the deep recesses of a closet! Whenever I’d pull him out his eyes were glazed over with panic. And the repairmen who came the next day scared him even more.

Soooo, all that to say, I’ve been a little preoccupied. I had planned to record an Audio Master Class and had to reschedule an interview I was supposed to do on Tuesday. I hope to get those done soon.

I am just so grateful that I was not here, and that there was not a fire, and that my kitties are OK, and that my computer was not plugged in. I work at home, but I don’t always plug it into the surge protector that is up in my office. That’s because I get bored up there, so I come down to my living room or dining room to work. But let this be a lesson to you–use a surge protector always, especially if you are in a lightning-prone area. That’s a lesson I was fortunate not to have learned the hard way.

Lots more great content coming your way! Thanks for you patience for the recent delay.

Oh, and the kitties have recovered just fine. Izzy got over it right away and would actually purr if a nuclear bomb went off, but Galibier took a few days to recover. But now, he is sitting at my feet looking up at me with love in his eyes instead of fear!