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26 July 2005
It is raining!→[More:]It's storming! It's raining! People are playing tennis in the lightning! Yay!
I would love lovelove to retire and spend the rest of my days storm-chasing. As soon as I win the lottery (which will never happen) any of you who want to come with me are welcome.
I love a good storm! Had a party once at my folks' house during a vicious storm and right in the middle of it...ZAP!.. a giant bolt of lightning struck a tree in front of the picture window. Just blew it apart and turned the sky a ghostly green. Everyone just went silent for about 30 full seconds, awed. Then my friend yelled, "You're so cool even GOD showed up!"
I used to do it a lot, anymore not as much. Gas prices are so high that it is just too expensive unless something happens right in my backyard. I need to get something that gets good mileage.
It is supposed to rain off and on all night, I hope it does. We were needing rain bad. A lot of days with 95+ temps and no real rain since sometime in the middle of June. A few days ago severe storms popped up and moved through the area pretty much unexpectedly but managed to miss us. Twenty miles in any direction from my house and they got at least a half inch of rain. It's impossible to keep everything watered, I have learned a lesson this summer. I am trying to make some of my perennial and shrub gardens less spread out so it will be easier to keep them watered in future dry spells. I need to install sprinklers but it would be such a huge job if I did it myself and $$$ if I hired someone, so.. blah.
Just blew it apart and turned the sky a ghostly green.
I happened to be hanging with several meteorologists (air traffic control institute) during a heavy storm in Cornwall, Ontario. We we on the sixth floor of a building, looking out toward the St. Lawrence when we saw three lightning strikes in quick succession -- to the same spot. Couldn't see where it struck down, exactly, due to the low visability, but by the second strike there was a green glow coming from the strike point and from the third strike it became quite bright. Over the next several minutes that glow spread but diluted, and in maybe ten minutes it was gone.
I asked the gang what they made of it, and they debated it for some time but didn't seem to have a conclusive answer on hand, so I take it that this is fairly unusual.
Essentially, a charge differential builds up in a certain spot and the formation of sparks is, for whatever reason, prohibitively difficult so the charge bleeds off into the air in an ethereal, glowing sort of way.
I've seen it a couple of times, and it's pretty neat.