“When the water fills the clouds, then they call on lightning!”
As I write this quote, we’re under a severe thunderstorm watch. And let me tell you… I think it might just do it, too. But you know how it is… a watch simply means that the conditions are right for such a storm to happen, and not that a storm is actually in progress and on its way. Still, it’s clouding up and it’s getting a little windy out. I have to say, thunderstorms are kind of cool. On one hand, we get rain, which is always appreciated, even after a season like we’ve had this year, where for a while we were having lots of rain every other day. And then on the other hand, we get a bit of a special-effects show from nature, as we get all kinds of things going on at once. We have the lightning, the thunder, the wind, and if it blows hard enough, the neighbor’s cat in that wind (poor old fluffy…). A thunderstorm is only really fun, though, if two things happen. First of all, I want to be inside a building somewhere. No driving allowed, because my car is quite susceptible to wind on its sides. Secondly, I want to be in a room with windows in it. No windows, and it’s kind of like getting the sound effects without the picture. It’s kind of like listening to the soundtrack of Seinfeld, and knowing that Kramer settled his lawsuit with the tobacco companies, and his lawyer doesn’t like the results, but having no idea what it was that happened (it was a giant guy on the Times Square building smoking a cigarette with actual smoke coming out of it). Without the visual, you don’t get the whole picture. Just like a thunderstorm in a room without windows. All you have is the sound effects, and so it’s just a bother. Speaking of thunderstorms, though, I remember one time when I was in second grade, we were having lunch during a big storm, and lightning hit the flagpole out front. That was something. Knocked some of the bricks right off the base of the flagpole, and knocked out the power in half the school. From my vantage point, it was no big show, because the cafeteria only had small windows along the (high) ceiling. But that would definitely have been a sight to see. All we got was a lot of thunder and such, and then a loud boom accompanied by half the cafeteria going dark. Needless to say, that was interesting, though the loud boom scared the you-know-what out of half the people around…
Date posted: August 5, 2003
Notes: The original image for this quote article was replaced with a similar free-content image when it was converted and restored in November 2011 as part of the conversion to WordPress. Attribution: Postdlf.
