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Stormy Weather
June 8, 2007 - 12:03pm
Have you ever been sitting in a room with a window without a light when evening comes along, and then not noticed as the room gets darker until suddenly you realize, hey, it's dark!
Well, I just had a wake up call about two minutes ago. It's just barely 5 p.m. and my office is dark. I mean, like, winter-almost-dark-at-5-p.m. dark. And, like, it's not getting dark until 9 p.m. most nights now.
I guess they weren't kidding when they said storm warnings are in effect. I'm trying to decide whether I should go out to the streetcar at this point. I have no coat since it's so hot out, and I keep meaning to buy myself an umbrella but you know how that goes...
Sigh. Oh well. Off I go, I guess!
It wasn't, it was a huge dust cloud. I think it may have blown off of the CN tracks or something. Never seen that before.
Leaving day care and sitting in the van waiting for the light to change, a blast of lightning hit close-- there was maybe half a "steamboat" between the flash and the clap.
Snarfy the Wonder Girl thought it was cool.
It's 6:00 pm now, and the sun is back out, but the temperature dropped about 10 degrees, and the air is dry and clean.
Hopefully it'll break the heat.
Anyhow it started to rumble and all of a sudden there was a snap, crackle and a boom! Very close to the back bedroom. I knew it wasn't the Rice Krispies as the cats came shooting out of the room and down into the basement.
They didn't look like Halloween cats, so I knew they hadn't been hit.
A couple of minutes later there was another snap, crackle and boom near the front door.
The dog was very unhappy and stuck to me like glue.
Lights went out for about a half hour and all is back to normal.
I went out a bit later to get lettuce from the garde. The lettuce is starting to rot with all the rain we have.
So much for the predictions of a hot dry summer.
Had my well water analysed and my water is pure and I am tempted to bottle it and sell it.
Clersal's pure spring water. Has a nice ring to it. [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]
When the cold front came through yesterday morning, there was no rain with it. We visited my niece west of London, out in the country south of Appin, just east of Glencoe.
The earth is baked there, no moisture in it at all. A walk through a rather magnificent example of Carolinian woods across the road from my nieces place showed dry cracked soil that should have been, if not full of standing water, at least muddy. Bad year if you like mosquitoes.
I treated the kids to a bunch of raspberries we found, but the berries were small and shrivelled.
Even milkweed in the soybean fields were stressed.(hmm. come to think, that may be as much due to "roundup" as it was lack of rain)
I'm not mentioning my nephew, because he was busy going to get 550 gallons of water to fill the basement cistern.
Years ago, we had a microburst take down trees and cause other damage in the neighborhood, and it taught me to have some respect for this kind of weather.
But when it cools off like it did the past couple of days, I don't watch. Typically, the cool winds out of the north east or north west (most often north west) blow over Georgian Bay or Lake Huron, and while the day starts clear as a bell, cotton puff clouds start to assemble, and by afternoon sometimes they crowd together.
It's excellent weather, actually, my favorite.
But late yesterday afternoon, a large cumulous cloud covered north London, and you could see tattered shards of dark grey cloud trying to move downward, and wierd patterns in the underside of the main cloud.
It looked tornadic, to me, in weather that wouldn't have me suspect that kind of activity.
I guess the air was cold not that far up in the atmosphere. In hot and humid weather, clouds have to get above 40,000 feet or more before they start hitting really cold air.
This is why I like the "Intelicast" Lansing Michigan radar. They show our area, and show the hieght of cloud tops, their direction and speed, and if hail or rotation has been detected.