Or as one of the managers I work with put it, "what the hail was that??"
Yes, last night at approximately 9ish pm PST we heard a familiar tap-tap-tapping at our window panes which was not the known rogue agent Jack Frost but was instead his sneaky samurai cousin, Jethro Hail. Only Jethro Hail could have snuck into San Francisco for about two minutes to regale us with morse code for "winter precipitation can happen to YOU!" and indeed, it did. Steve and I ran out to our back stairs and stuck our hands out to find cute little candy sized (think Nerds or Pop-Rocks) nubbins of hail tap-dancing with wee feet on everything around us.
Being the total weather-weenie that I have become after 3 years in San Francisco, I immediately rushed inside and put on a winter coat and then rushed back outside to ogle the little deposits of New England nostalgia still bombarding us.
We got a good two minutes of bonafide precipitation people! I was 30 seconds away from buying a snow blower...
It's been quite the eventful climate week -- a 3.6 quake felt by our office on Friday afternoon, the thunder and hail storm that struck last night, and as I'm typing still another thunderstorm is flashing its wares and gnashing its teeth outside. Highly irregular -- our 'thunderstorms' out here are usually the equivalent of a limp handshake -- lightning that would rather be on its lunch break, thunder that would prefer to hire telemarketers, and rain dropped from a machine whose meter is obviously set on the "low/moist" end of the spectrum, rather than the "high/zero to soaked in 7 seconds" end. Thunder that can actually be heard -- repeatedly -- is, well, unheard of. As is lightning born of something stronger than heat.
On another note -- does anyone know why it's called "hail?"
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
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