Strikeout

Late summer makes me think of thunderstorms, baseball and Steve. This post first appeared in 2014. Last weekend there was an unseasonable lightning storm on the coast. Not here (thank goodness, for our dog’s sake), but farther south. More than 1,400 strikes touched down across the region, with 13 people reporting injuries in Los Angeles […]

Powerless And Fully Dark

The hail was the first thing to wake me up. First a light patter, like pennies falling off the counter and onto the floor, but then it got worse. Thunk. It sounded like someone had thrown a rock at my window. For a second I thought it might shatter, spilling wind and rain into my […]

Strikeout

Last weekend there was an unseasonal lightning storm on the coast. Not here (thank goodness, for our dog’s sake), but farther south. More than 1,400 strikes touched down across the region, with 13 people reporting injuries in Los Angeles County alone. A golfer was hit on Catalina Island, 22 miles from Los Angeles. One young […]

Bad Things Happen

This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection.  That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides:  a cell of convection.  This convective cell is called a supercell and […]