a few months ago i was awakened by one of the loudest electrical storms that i have ever experienced.
what must have surely been a very close lightning strike jolted me upright in bed and signaled the start of ten minutes of torrential downpour that was quite a sight to see and hear, so i was glad i was awake for it!

i like thunderstorms.

last night, i was again awakened by an electrical storm, but this time it is not the volume of the experience that will stand out in my memory, it is the brightness –
one loud thunderclap, lots of pelting rain, and, i kid you not, 20 minutes of steady flickering on the horizon that was bright enough to light up my room. at first i thought the lightning must have struck a disco ball factory or something (it was 4:30 in the morning, pardon me for making sketchy conclusions) because the blinking was so constant and regular, and there was almost no thunder to be heard. i couldn’t figure it out, but i looked out the window for several minutes, watching the light skitter and dance in the clouds, and it was definitely lightning, so i just sat back and took it in.

i still don’t really understand how quiet it was, except that it must have been far away, and mostly cloud-based, but whatever it was, it was awesome, and i have never seen anything quite like it.
it rivals the time that i saw an electric storm from the window of an airplane, and the lightning was jumping from cloud to cloud and illuminating them from within.

definitely worth waking up for, though the corresponding sleep interruption contributed to the constellation of reasons that led me to skip my infovis class this morning, which was probably not the wisest of decisions.
sigh.
oh well.

welcome to spring!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 1:07 pm and is filed under things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.