I just stepped inside after hanging out on my balcony watching a severe thunderstorm roll through. (I figure I'm safe because I'm surrounded by buildings higher than I am.)

I even ate a few pieces of hail that I picked up.

I have the 365 cats calendar. Today's cat is named Loki, and his owner is named Sarah, from Baltimore, MD.

Ooooooooh

It astonishes me that multiple people are willing to name their cats Loki. I mean, I believe it, but it's like that time they called a hurricane Ophelia.

Also, I forgot my computer at work, so I either need to skip tomorrow morning's teleconference or get up super-early to be at the office by 7. Mother fudgebucket.

I named two cats Banshee and Jinx once. In retrospect, don't do that.

Just now my cat was sitting in an open window when some loud thunder came out of the blue. She looked around nervously and after a few seconds she decided to leave the window. But no hiding for her.

She's pretty mellow. When we had an earthquake at 4:00 am she was concerned but not freaked out.

Hope the stone passes as painlessly as possible, Drew.

A friend's grandfather was once struck by lightning that came through a windowpane and the back of an armchair. And I've had a TV get fried by a nearby lightning strike. (Dad was a TV repairman, and has seen old style picture tubes explode like frag grenades, so we were always very careful about TVs during storms.)

We also had to get off the phone because the lightning would follow the phone line into the house.

In 1985 my grandfather's brand-new IBM Color PC and even-newer 1200 baud modem was fried by a lightning strike to a telephone pole three houses down the street. Yet there was no damage to his touch-tone phone, or (as far as he could determine) anyone else's phone along the street.

I figure I'm safe because I'm surrounded by buildings higher than I am.

I dunno, lightning can do strange things. I witnessed one incident when I was working at a small airport back in the '90s. The operations building I was in had a 40-foot metal pole on it with our VHF radio antenna on top. Two hundred yards away, on the other side of the runway, was a metal hangar with a roof peak about 30 feet high. But instead of hitting either of those high conductive points, lightning struck the flat runway in between.

I love a storm and tend to sit and watch right in front of the window.

Oh, yes. Me too.

My volunteer maple seems to be doing well. I am tempted to call him Groot. [link]

So 5 hours later I have eaten all depressingly healthy snacks from the machines, had a tetanus shot, gotten an antibiotic prescription and possibly convinced a nice doctor named Dr. Patel to read Henry Adams.

One of my great-grandmother's sisters ran outside to try to get the laundry in before a storm and was killed by lightning. The story goes that she was wearing a dress with metal buttons down the front and had burns where each button touched her.