Surreal

You may have heard - we had a bit of a storm last night. The Fraters confirmed it, so you know it's a fact.

The kids and I were driving...

...north on Snelling past the Fairgrounds as the hailstorm started. The wind was howling like Howard Dean, blowing the branches horizontal, and the hail was approaching the size of Robert Byrd's brain.

I saw something in the distance - a large blue flash. It appeared quickly - but trained off out of sight to the right. I figured it was an excessively-bright halogen headlamp via some quirk of optics in the rain and wind.

Then, as we crested the big ramp over Como Avenue, we saw it again - a blue explosion, cascading huge sparks that the wind whipped straight to the east before they burned out somewhere above the ground. Then another. Then another, just as we passed it, lighting up the neighborhood for a couple seconds like a huge blue Klieg light.

My daughter was tense, and my son was plugging his ears - the hail was rattling off the roof like DFL budget initiatives clattering off the electorate's hide before bouncing out of consciousness, with a noise louder than Sandy Pappas in full legislative rut.

But for a moment it was a beautiful scene - the blue glare highlighting the scene with flailing branches under the churning sky, the searingly bright blue blaze (a transformer? Street lamp?) flashing and sputtering and showering sparks before burning out.

Got home to find that, for one, my basswood tree didn't shed any branches. It was a good weekend!