Thanksgiving / Lightning

Well, Thanksgiving weekend was a success on my end. Hopefully all was well on everyone else's end as well. My first Black Friday experience was a success. Tia and I waited for only about 45 minutes in the cold until 4 a.m. when Sears opened. From the time the doors opened, til we had the items and had checked out successfully only 8 minutes passed. I looked at my cell phone to see the time as I was walking to my car to pull it up to the door and it was only 4:08. I call this, great success. If only we had that much success chasing together this season! We browsed a couple other stores for the hell of it since we were already out, and returned home and were in bed by around 6.

On a more "chasing" related note, I finally got around to playing with some old video this weekend. I had always wanted to do a higher quality upload of the August 22nd 2002 lightning bolt that I captured striking a tree 17 yards from the camera during an insane lightning barrage. I don't think I've ever encountered a more electrified storm. For about 30 minutes we constantly took cloud to ground bolts within 100 yards. Just watch the video clip below. After the initial strike 17 yards away, the camera falls to the ground, but you can still make out the flickering from the following bolts. There are a good 3 or 4 additional strikes with near simultaneous crashes of thunder. Never seen anything like it!

As seems the norm around the web community, I'll be spending the next couple months updating old logs. Since buying my current domain in late 2007, I had not moved everything from the cheapo geocities domain I had hosted everything on previously. Without warning (that reached me!) geocities was discontinued and I lost everything prior to 2008's season. I guess that's the final motivation I needed to update everything! Some will be lost for good though I suppose, as I'll likely only replace those worth replacing as I simply don't care to do 25 logs a year dating back to 2001/2002 when I first started getting out there regularly. However, those that I do replace I hope to do a little more in depth than I previously had. I won't be able to do near the detail in my chase summaries after so many years but I'm going back and gathering radar images and other such data to try and give a little more background on each day.

Anyway, as promised: