As I was tinkering with the comment display template for this blog yesterday evening, there was a sound like a bomb going off as lightning struck quite near my office and turned off all the computers on my floor. Everyone wandered around the hallway for a couple minutes saying, “Gosh,” and I postponed my tinkering and watched the storm instead.

Growing up near the Pacific Coast, I don’t remember ever having any impressive hailstorms. Hanging around the field on summer nights watching heat lightning dance in the distance, okay. But we just didn’t have the right conditions to bounce the hailstones way back up into the sky until they were the size of tennis balls; the only hail I remember was the size of rock salt.

My car was parked under a tree yesterday, for which I was grateful hail-wise, although I did wonder what might happen should that tree decide to attract a bolt of lightning.

Driving home, some underpasses were impassable due to flooding. There were drifts of hail on the shoulders of the road. My youngest daughter used the thunderstorm exception to gain access to the big bed at night and the tortoise slept in the kitchen. I almost stepped on her in the morning when I went in to make breakfast. She stopped briefly to look at me, accusingly, before resuming her morning laps around the kitchen floor in what looked like grey socks (our cleaning lady has been on vacation).