Yes It's Yet Another Lightning/Rain Blog Entry

A miniature version of our periodic "Esterkey Lake" caused by last night's rain

Yes I know everyone in New Mexico is doing a rain blog today. But I missed out on the fun with the earlier July storms and last night was my first good night to sit and watch the natural light show and repeatedly resurgent rain.

Alongside my pathologically thunder-phobic golden retriever, I watched lightning strike after lightning strike. I have my own lightning-related neurosis, and on infrequent outside trips to batten down our extensive array of hatches (whatever those really are) I ran like Freddy Krueger was chasing me. Getting struck by 6 trillion volts or whatever it is just doesn't sound like that good of an idea to me.

With rain starting, pelting, slowing, stopping and starting again over and over it was a great night for a weather junkie like myself. Many a trip was spent refreshing the Weather Underground radar, while petting my golden retriever as reassuringly as possible with my non-mouse hand. Then the lightning would get too close and we'd have to shut the computers down. With every shutdown I would again think of the following question: Can voltage from lightning travel through a wireless network? I pondered that one like the veritably laughable Science-uninformed Humanities teacher that I am.

But can it?

I don't know about other every other part of town, but we in the South Valley got drenched last night when we weren't almost being killed by lightning. My wife and I have a name, "Esterkey Lake", for the body of water created out in the horse stalls whenever it really comes down. We're just at Esterkey Pond status as of now (as depicted in the photo above), but with decent chances of rain in the forecast for some days ahead, we might challenge lake, if not ocean, denotation. I'm not complaining, although our goat Petunia (mascot of this blog) reacts to the mud and slop like it was a full baby's diaper. As you probably know, goats are pretty snooty about alot of things.

Maybe you're a fellow weather junkie and will start firing up the Weather Underground radar about 2:00 this afternoon. I'll be right there with ya, refreshing like a madman. We need to remember these (dare I say it) monsoonal days during the other 335 boring-as-hell weather days the rest of the year.