I was lucky enough to take a day off work this week, giving me an extra long weekend to enjoy the rain. Here’s a fun fact for anyone reading this: I LOVE variable weather. I mean, you have to when you live in Victoria, right?
A few of my favorite activities include:
laying in the grass on warm days, watching the cloud formations float by,
reading books in front of an open fire when there is rain,
chasing storm cells to photograph lightning (I’m yet to get a decent picture!),
hiking in the wet and wild,
taking photos of frost on grass and boundary fences,
trying to identify hook echoes on weather radar (often an indicator of a potential tornado).
Perhaps the only weather I’m not a fan of is multiple days of 40+ degrees. It’s not the heat per ‘se, but the ever-present threat of a bushfire.
One day I’d like to spend a season chasing tornadoes in the US. For now, I’ll try to track one down locally (not unheard of) and live vicariously through professional storm chasers.
My WILDEST weather story:
Many years ago, I lived in a house overlooking the sea. It was nice. The downside however, was that the house was horribly exposed to the weather. You couldn’t enjoy the balcony without a gale - even on a seemingly windless day.
Late one night, a powerful thunderstorm developed. The wind was intense. I was watching out the balcony doors when I saw a bolt of lightning strike a power pole close to the water’s edge.
It exploded in a show of sparks. But that wasn’t all. One after another, the power poles along that road also exploded, including some on the street leading up to our house.
The house plunged into darkness, the power poles were on fire and right then, the wind began to HOWL.
At the time, we had some extremely heavy pot plants on our deck. It took three people to move them there when we moved in. We thought they’d be fine.
Instead, the pots, caught in a burst of wind shattered as they flung into the glass doors. I managed to collect the fragments and wrestle the surviving ones out of the wind.
We were without power for most of the night.