20 August 2008

Struck by Thunder

It was a dark and stormy night... no, really, it was. Actually, it began as a hot and sunny day which was clouded over with dust and smoke from the harvesting of the Palouse fields. But then the clouds' positive and negative charges decided to argue, or maybe Zeus just got mad, or something like that and in came the massive billowing gray storm clouds. The lightning began soon after, which Janna, Liz, Phil, and I watched from the windows as it streaked and branched through the evening's dark gray skies. And then came my slightly eccentric idea to go up to Thompson lawn to get a better view.

After a bit of a detour through the XA house to pick up a few more crazy and willing participants for our expedition, Brian and Snook joined us. We were able to lay out on the thick green lawn for about 5 minutes of crackling lightning and thunderous thunder before the rain began. We sat there and got wet for all of a minute until it began to rain in earnest and Snook casually mentioned we could go into Carpenter. That did it, and thus began the pell mell beeline for dryness, with Brian snapping pictures the whole way.

We ended up on the 4th floor (after a damp elevator ride) and watched some more lightning. It all became a bit confusing after this and in conclusion we were joined by Mr. Phil Aasen hanging from a tree...

Because it was a slightly warm pouring rain a dance party soon ensued out in the lawn. Janna concluded that the hokie pokie induced the best lightning of the slightly purple sort, so of course we hokie pokied in the rain. I mean really? Why not? And to add to the 'why not' part, the sprinklers came on so we ran through them and got even wetter. I must say, dancing through sprinklers and throwing water from your hair at screaming friends in the pouring rain in the dark of night to the sound of thunder overhead. The semester couldn't have started off any better than that.