Never Dark

We had an interesting night last night. For over two hours after sunset, it was never dark. I suppose for many it should have been frightening. For us it was fascinating.

It started with rumbling. Trucks? We weren't close enough to the highway for that much noise. And that many trucks? Unlikely. It wasn't time yet for the forecast severe weather possibility, and yet....

I decided to step outside to try to find out what was going on. The rumbling was still pretty steady, but now let's add flickering. Of course! Lightning! It was still to the west, over and beyond the lake.  

Let's be clear here: I'm very used to lightning, fascinated by storms in fact, just a different kind. As I watched for a while, I figured out what that difference was. What I'm used to are ground strikes, the kind that hit trees, buildings, ignite fires, kill people. Steve actually witnessed such an event decades ago, when a fisherman refused to leave a lake in the face of an impending storm. Everybody else knew to head for shore with the first sign of lightning. This idiot stayed out in the lake, casting. As he raised his pole for his last time, lightning followed it down into his body. You can bet nobody even considering heading out to rescue him, much less retrieve the body, until well after the storm had passed.

Last night's storm was, as far as I could tell, all cloud-to-cloud lightning. It stayed high, illuminating the clouds, never ceasing or being accented with the large boom from ground strikes which seem to discharge the energy, if only for a few seconds.  Now, no booms, no pauses in having the sky lit, just different pieces of sky illuminated higher, lower, in a different direction than an instant before. Instead of jumping glows, there were occasional zigging-zagging patterns of lightning under the clouds, sometimes a small 3/4 circle, sometimes a long line crossing the sky with side branches going everywhere. .. except down. I never stopped being fascinated.

I went for the camera, of course. Unfortunately its light meter wasn't up to the task. Bright flashes caught its attention but on time delay, so it just recorded the tail ends of it while on video. Then all went black again even though the sky didn't. Obviously I need more study on settings for the next storm.

I also went for the laptop, checking out the Real Time Lightning Map. I had thought our little corner of the world would be popping with all the lightning flashes. Think again. It barely showed one strike. Sometimes two. Sometimes none. This leads me to think that however they register lightning around the world, it must only register strikes which hit the ground. The other possibility I can surmise is that, because it wasn't discharging into the ground, it all registered as a single strike, the way it only takes one hockey puck to bounce all over the rink but it doesn't stop and score until it hits the net. I have no idea how to check either idea out.

Rain? Well, a few sprinkles landed while the system sailed over, enough eventually to wet the street, but it was still building. Morning news showed it didn't really get going until miles into Wisconsin. That's OK, we've been getting enough on the eastern edge of central Minnesota, keeping lawn mowers and their owners from getting bored. We're not truly flooded here though the St. Croix is still way too high for Steve to go fishing at his favorite spot yet. At least we're not on the Blue Earth River waiting for the Rapidan Dam to fail, nor in places like Watertown, thoroughly living up to its name with flooding right now. In fact our place is well up a gentle slope from its lake, and a couple feet up off the ground even if the lake should manage to flood. But after several years of drought here, it's still well under its normal banks despite our abundant rain.

Mosquitoes of course are totally loving this year. We victims, not so much.

Meanwhile lots more boxes to unpack. Before last night's light show, I drove over to my son's house to drop off a full bin's worth of recycling, mostly cardboard pieces. His recycling pickup was this morning. Ours is next week. Our can will be full too, and that's with saving the big packing boxes, flattened, for the next person who's moving and wants free boxes. (Buy your own tape!) We also have bags of excelsior and more of packing peanuts. The bubble wrap is reserved for the kids in the family, sorry. The smaller boxes, unless crumpled as they sometimes can get in moving, are cut back into flats for organizing the pantry room. It is in the process of being filled with shelving, which in turn is to be organized by content. So, one flat for mac & cheese, for example, another for cans of soup, or chili, or coffee, or peanut butter, or... well, you get the idea. If a shelf unit gets bumped the flats will keep their contents both organized and on the shelves. I had thought of getting half-high milk crates, but why buy (what's not even in the stores these days) when all those boxes are otherwise going to waste... er, recycling? Besides, I don't have to bother with pulling off all the packing tape from the lower half of those boxes!  Win-win!