Summer storms

I love thunderstorms, probably to levels that shouldn't be considered safe by normal standards. When I lived in the dorms a couple years ago and they forced us to the basement during a tornado warning? I was the guy that snuck out the back and stood on top of the parking garage to take photos like this one:

I drove through today's storm, accidentally, because I didn't have the time to check my usual radar page. Oops. If I'd checked it, I would've seen something like this:

So, there I was, on Stadium Boulevard, driving to work through a stretch where the sky got dark -- and I really mean late-evening twilight dark. By the time I got to Forum (like a mile or two from campus) the sky started lightening up. As if the system had come and gone without doing anything. Oh, if only we were so lucky.

I waited maybe a minute for the stoplight to turn green. It started to rain right as the light turned green. By the time I passed where the old T.K. Brothers grill/pub stands (quarter mile, if even), the rain got really hard. Then I started noticing little ice pellets.

And then everything turned to white. Like a blizzard. A blizzard of sleet. And by blizzard, I do want to convey that I couldn't see anything past a couple feet.

I made it to work just fine; I ran through the parking lot, under the Yankees umbrella I got from one of the games I went to last year, as the rain and hail continued to flood everything around me. The sleety hail didn't do anything to my car; the pellets were just too small to do any damage to anything.

That got my heart going better than anything I've done recently. I can't wait for more.

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Also, an update on photos from my vacation: I can't seem to find the negatives I developed in St. Louis and I think they're somewhere lost somewhere between here, St. Louis, or New Jersey. I'll keep you posted.

April 3, 2008 • permalink •

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Summer storms