Light of My Life

Lightning has been a consistent part of my life recently. Last week Julia and I were having dinner at a place right on the Sound when it started to drizzle. This didn't seem so unreasonable, being that we were in Seattle. We had an umbrella over our table, so we stayed outside; we were the only ones to chose this course of action. The weather situation quickly deteriorated from this bucolic scene into a full fledged storm. At one point we're pretty sure a bolt of lightning hit the top of our umbrella. Here is a picture I found of the storm on Flikr:

The waitstaff assured us that lightning is really very rare in Seattle, which I guess I believed, but was still a little surprised by this map of lightning flash densities:

That's dramatic, and something I had never really considered before. How do you feel about kids growing up on the West Coast who don't see lightning?

On our flight back from MSP to MSN there were some storm delays. Once we finally got up into the sky it was like a fireworks display off our starboard bow (Do airplanes have port and starboard sides? Do they have bows and sterns?). I can remember see lightning while flying before, but this was sort of ridiculous. Also ridiculous was the pilot, who continued to turn into the storm until we were bouncing along on top(?) of it. And while we're on the topic, it has become clear that Northwest Airlines pilots are the worst landers in all of commercial aviation. Seriously. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of this storm.

My third and final lightning story. Last night Madison had a doozy of a storm. It woke me up around 4:15 AM. This was confusing because my clock said 3:01 (power outage?) and annoying because I was supposed to wake up at 5:05 anyway. Here is a picture taken last night, again from Flickr:

That's it. I don't have any other point.