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2000-02-28 | 23:17:15

It's raining out and I can feel it in my hips, in my bones. My bones hurt, hips, legs, feet; my tibula, fibula, fibulae, whatever. Hurt. What am I, Granny Green Springs? It makes me feel like an old hillbilly, talking about my rheumatism and the weather. Rheumatism and revenuers are the bane of my existence: I am a hillbilly.

I stayed with my Grandma when I was kid and she was adamant about storms. When it was thunder and lightning, you couldn't talk on the phone or sit near the window. She didn't really want you to turn on the light or watch TV, either, but she'd allow it. She'd be nervous all through the storm. I like the thunderstorms myself but we don't get thunder and lightning in California. Maybe once or twice a year, and nothing much. I wouldn't mind moving somewhere where they have storms. I like the noise and the drama.

When I lived in Iowa, in the summer of '93, that was when they had some big, big storms. The whole area flooded, Iowa City flooded and they had standing water and the students were threatened with meningitis, from the mosquitoes and the standing water. The thunder and lightning would start in the evening and keep going through the night. My dog Daisy was a wreck then. She would crawl under my desk and shiver with fear as long as it thundered. One time the lightning came through the power line or something and fried my modem. It literally made that electric frying noise: "ZzzzOTT!" I should have shut down my system instead of staying online, having too much fun, talking and laughing silently with my stranger friends in the middle of a giant thunderstorm.

I bought another modem, paid some outrageous amount, $250, for another 2400 baud modem, and then somehow got the first one working again, and never used the new one, because I couldn't get it to work. Sometimes I spend money and it feels like penance.

I met Duff online that summer, when he was working at a lab monitoring lightning strikes. We'd be on the phone or on the computer, and he'd tell me where in the world lightning was striking at that very moment. I thought it was wonderfully evocative and romantic. But we haven't seen much lightning lately. Frankly, I can't remember the last time I saw lightning.

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