KABLOOIE! Lightning BLAM! Hit CRASH! the BOOM! tree.

So yesterday, early evening, Sal and I are in the house minding our own dang business when a bolt outta the blue nearly wiped us off the face the earth. Not 5 minutes before it happened, Sally asked me what kinda storm it looked like was coming "this time". I brought it up on the radar map and it was a little dinky Adams Family type of thing.

No sooner had we laughed about it being a "wussie" storm when God, Thor, Nikola Tesla, and Ben Franklin taught us a lesson in very close proximity lightning strikes.

The tree that it hit in our yard is a huge old maple... probably close to 100 years old... maybe more, but in that neighborhood. This tree sits about 20 feet away from the west side of our house. For one split second the living room where I was sitting was illuminated like 20 arc welders going on at once, then a house shuddering explosion and honest to gosh... we felt "hot" in the house. Totally incredible.

Here's a couple of pics of the tree. You can actually see the path of the lightning bolt on the tree where it stripped the bark off of it. The oriole feeder there is hanging from a cast iron rooster on the tree. It busted the rooster in two and blew the top of it away from the tree... it later fell off last nite sometime. There's bark all over the place.








You know how people always say when someone's been in a horrible, blindingly fast accident... "They never knew what hit 'em"

Ha.

And Ha again.

And to put an end to the thought about what you'd do if you didn't have time to rationalize an explosion but your loved one was standing right there? Well... of course Sally and I looked at one another and yelled "I LOVE YOU!"

Ha once more.

We both simultaneously yelled the slang for excrement... quite loudly. A few times. So much for last words of love eh. lol

We kinda wandered around the living room/dining room patting ourselves down and trying to figure out just what the hell had taken place. We got it all figured out shortly and Sal asked me if I was okay and I said "yeah". I asked if she was doing alright... cause it really shook us up and she said she "thought she was having a heart attack and had lost her ability to say the ABC's.

She regained her alphabetism shortly afterwards... but she's ending every sentence she says with "...the goose drank wine" for some reason now. I hope that goes away soon.


Anyway, it played heck with some of our puters and equipment here in our home. We've just got my laptop hardwired up to the internet right now. I think it's gonna take the power of my son in law Martin to get it straightened out this weekend.

Seriously, we're ready for the rain to just kinda ease up now. Really.

It's not fun anymore.





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