Satellite Radio and The Lightning Strike

Recently I had the opportunity to listen to satellite radio. XM Radio to be exact which also included some Sirius stations. Now I would never have gone out and purchased the service but I did have to purchase a new car recently and the XM radio was included in the package. I din't really care for it all that much initially. I like programing my own music in the car with CDs or my iPod but my wife likes the satellite radio and she uses the car for her daily commute to work. So where does the lightning strike come in? My car was struck by lightning and totaled causing me going out to buy a new car which happened to have satellite radio. It took a while to really determine what happened to my car. We didn't know right away about the lightning strike. I just went out to the car one morning to go to work and it didn't start. I called AAA and they couldn't get it started so it was towed to a shop in the neighborhood. They couldn't figure out what was wrong. The car stayed with them for a week before they finally gave up and said I needed to take the car to the dealer. This car was a 2001 Honda Accord with 21K miles on it and I have a very short commute. This car was going to last a long time. Except it got struck by lightning. So after a week in the one shop it went to the dealer and they had the car for another week before they admitted that they couldn't figure out what was wrong either. The electrical system was fried and the computer system gave weird readings. At one point one of the technicians jokingly said to me it looked like the car was jumped by a Mac truck. That got me thinking about maybe it was struck by lightning because we had some bad electrical storms in the area. I checked the newspaper online archive and saw that there was a bad storm with lots of lightning the night before I had the problem with the car. We were out that night in the other car and we remembered the big storm that night. Our block club has a listserv and I emailed the group asking if anyone remembered a lightning strike that night. Several people replied to describe lightning strikes that night and one person was on his porch when he saw lightning strike a tree in front of his house. My car was parked on the street that night under that tree. I brought up the possibility of the car being struck by lightning to the dealer technician and he exclaimed that it would explain lots of things. They were truly boggled with the problem and even had the resources of the national Honda network which was not helping them with the situation. They started looking at the car with a lightning strike in mind and things started making sense to them. Then they found a small series of scorch marks on the roof of the car which confirmed the lighting strike. By this time another week had passed and we were without the car for three weeks now. I made an insurance claim and the adjuster came out and declared the car totaled. It just was not worth fixing and how could they fix it? One would never know if they got all the problems solved and how many man hours would it take to go through the entire electrical system. No, it was totaled. We got a check from the insurance company and went out looking for a car. This was not a good time to look for a used car because we just went through a summer of high gas prices and all the good fuel effecient cars had been snapped up. We looked at new cars and finally ended up getting a 2009 Hyundai Sonata that happened to include XM satellite radio free for three months. I got to check out satellite radio for the first time and yeah there sure are a lot of stations. A week after we had the car we drove down to Philadelphia for a long weekend and I really got to experience this new radio service. Most of the stations were crap but there was a handful that kept us going on the trip. We also tried out some of the comedy stations and some news but mainly it was music of course. As time went on having this radio what really started making a difference was the special shows with interesting people picking the music. An example of these would be Bob Dylan's show. That was an interesting listen full of great picks and a unique take on music. Another great find was Little Steven's Underground Garage. A great selection of music that was always interesting and fun to listen to. It also led me to explore some of the new garage revival bands featured on his show and where many of them were being signed to his record label Wicked Cool Records. I've been listening to lots of new music through his show and his label and of course I love listening to new music. I got a new mix coming. I feel it. A mix full of these great garage bands. Coming soon.