smitten

First time - last autumn, after a lightening during a storm our PC's
power supply and motherboard was burnt out, even though we had a guard on the
socket set. To the advice of the Computer People we bought a large heavy thingy that
not only supposed to do this spike-guard duty, but is supposed to keep the PC powered during power failures.
Well, we had another storm yesterday - guess what - after a second of power failure the computer went down again,
the bloody marvellous thingy did bugger-all. The good news is, that the PC picked itself up again as it were, after a few
attempts... I suspect the main damage was to the line between it and the monitor after all,
but we had been smited/smote/smitten for sure...
The storks - well, one of them - started to lay, even though the nest looks a bit shoddy.