The strangest rainstorm struck my town yesterday. A friend I know who lives 15 minutes north of me never got any rain. Leen, who was driving home from Chincoteague and was about two hours south when I called, never got any rain. But me -- I got so much rain, it was like somebody blew up the ocean.

I was sitting down in our family room, which is on the basement level of a duplex. I heard the rain getting louder and louder all around me, and I thought, hey, that's a pretty big rainstorm. It was a big enough rainstorm that it took the power out -- well, *mostly* out, as I will explain -- and I was abruptly logged out of RinkChat mid-conversation.

So while I'm unplugging my computer and hoping that the surge protection was adequate, I'm thinking, gosh, that rainstorm sounds really close and loud.

It's because it was raining inside the house. At the bottom of the stairs leading down to the family room, the rain was *streaming* in, from a cluster of five or six different spots. Towels wouldn't be enough, and putting down a big pot underneath the dripping had a logical complication: the drips were partially over the lowest step and partially just off it, so there was no way to lie a pan down directly underneath, as half of it would be off the step. So I pulled out the card table, angled it over the step, and put the pot on top. Then I fetched all of our towels and mopped up the water, which was so plentiful that it was pooling on *top* of the rug instead of soaking in.

My next problem was immediately apparent. The big giant pot I put under there was filling up at about the rate of a gallon every five minutes. I had to call the landlord and get him over pronto.

My next problem was immediately apparent. My landlord's phone number is on my computer, which was not powering up due to the brown-out. Maybe the phone number was lying around on paper somewhere, but if so, only Leen knew where it was. So I figured I'd call her, and she could tell me where the number was, and then I could call the landlord.

My next problem was immediately apparent. The phone lines were down. Leen had the cell phone with her.

So I went over to our neighbors in the other half of the duplex, and they were looking out their front door at the deluge and said, "Is your basement dripping too?" and I said, "Dripping? Ha ha ha." So I asked if they had a cell phone and our landlord's number, and they did, and while he was on the phone, we noticed what the problem was.

The steps leading up to both our front doors are brick steps. At the base of the steps, in the seam between the bricks and the asphalt path is...NOTHING! Nothing but big gaping holes and scrids of sealant from ages gone by. Because of the slopes of the immediate area, the rain normally doesn't come in so much, but when it rains so hard that the gutters overflow from the volume, it all comes crashing down right on those steps, into the house, and onto my stairs. I positioned our doormats over the holes, and it reduced the dripping quite a bit. But by that time I had already filled the 5-6 gallon pot once and had to dump it out, and the second fill was well on its way.

Meanwhile, I checked out other parts of the house to see that everything else was fine. The brown out had done some strange things. The lights were all at about 20% the usual luminosity. The fan and air conditioner, which were on high, were now performing at low and comically low, respectively. And down in the living room, I heard this strange clicking sound.

The clicking sound was a mechanical sound, repeating every couple of seconds. I tracked it to the TV stand. I opened up the cabinet, and it was the VCR, turning itself on and off again. It had enough power to work the electronic portion of the VCR, but not enough to run the mechanical parts. So it would come on, try to thread the tape inside around the various spools and so forth, fail due to lack of power, and shut itself off again. But the machine was on, so it would power back up, fail, and power down again, ad nauseum. I slapped the power button, and that didn't work, so I slapped it some more, and no matter what I did, I could not get it to stop. So I unplugged it from the wall.

While I was still mildly weirded out by the freaky electronics, I went upstairs to check out the air conditioner. As I said earlier, it was running "commically low," that is, the switch was set to "high" but the power level was so low it was barely humming, and the air flowing from the vent was something akin to a barely perceptible draft.

So I fiddled with it a bit. I turned it off, and I turned it on again, and when it came on, it started to power up strong but eased down again right off.

And amidst the low hum of the barely functioning air conditioner, I heard another strange sound coming from somewhere in the room.

I looked around and discovered it to be Leen's clock radio, sitting over on her nightstand. It had turned itself on.

I went over to turn it off, but it was already switched off. I hit snooze, which shuts it off completely if it's set to play in 'sleep' mode, and that turned it off. When the radio went off, the digital display of the time, previously too dark to see, brightened up a bit.

Well that was odd. So I went back to play with the air conditioner. I turned it off and on again. The clock radio started playing music again.

The power went off entirely a while later, which was just as well, because I was thoroughly weirded out and wondering vaguely just how *many* Indian burial grounds were underneath my house.