Near Death Experience

Yesterday, I bought a real, working camera! No more manual focus! No more removing dust from every picture in post! No more freezing up at the most inopportune moments! No more "Card Error, Reformat?" messages! That's right, I'm officially open for business now. I'll be posting lots of pictures as soon as I take them.

On my way home from picking up the camera in Providence I noticed this huge wall of black hovering over the Rhode Island - Connecticut line. The base was swirling clouds and lightning flashed every few seconds. As I was watching in amazement and trying to decide whether or not there are tornados in this part of the world, a car passed me with it's lights flashing rapidly. "That's odd", I thought and kept driving. As I crossed over into CT it went black, debris was flying in the air and all of a sudden I couldn't see anything because my car was hit as if I was driving through a waterfall. I freaked out and pulled off the road. Then I freaked out because I was afraid of a tree falling on me. So I got back on the road very slowly and immediately freaked out again and got off the road which caused me to freak out about the whole tree crashing into my car possibility. After repeating this procedure a few times I came upon a line of cars stopped because of a tree blocking the road. At this point I called Matthew on the verge of tears because I only know of one way home, and there was a tree in my way and I'm from Southern California and if it starts to sprinkle the news goes to full time "storm watch". I finally found a church with a nice open parking lot and waited the worst of the storm out before following the new directions Matthew gave me. There were a few more trees down on the rest of the drive, but the worst was over.

In California you have fire season and rainy season. Rainy season is a few weeks of a constant rainfall. It can have it's moments, but NOTHING like this. So in conclusion, can anyone tell me what the "smart" way to handle storms like this?

Also, I can't get Photoshop CS to open the raw files for the Canon. I downloaded the plugin and followed all the instructions but it's not working. I know I had this problem in the past with the Minolta, but I can't remember how I fixed it. Does anyone have any suggestions?